Poetry and Animals

76POEMS OF THE ANIMAL

poet to capture and fix the moment in the poem, which he recognizes
as impossible since the birds “tower up, shatter, and madden space /
With their divergences.”

It is by words and the defeat of words,

Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt,

That for a flying moment one may see

By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt.

These final lines of the poem suggest that the process of trying to cap-
ture the spectacular moment leads to an equally ephemeral but pro-
found sense of the connection between the speaker and the animals he
has seen. Just as the birds gather and separate, just as the poem attempts
to reflect one moment of interaction between the speaker and the living
world, so too more generally do animals and people connect and sepa-
rate. That these are “cross-purposes” implies a kind of symbiosis between
birds and humans, as though they exist for us to appreciate their beauty
and complexity, but also that we are all part of a vast web of life.
Wilbur’s poem “Advice to a Prophet” makes this case much more
explicitly and urgently. First published in 1961, it addresses the immediate
threat of atomic annihilation rather than the slow burn of our environ-
mental devastation. The poem asks the prophet, “When you come, as
you soon must,” not to bother speaking of the obvious threats we are
imposing on ourselves but to “speak of the world’s own change”—that
is, on the effect we are having on the natural world through our vari-
ous modes of general destruction.^43 “What should we be without / The
dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,” the poem asks. The argument of the
poem is that the most tragic effects of (and thus the most compelling
arguments against) our myopic destruction of the planet are those we
knowingly or unknowingly inflict on other living beings. “How shall
we call / Our natures forth when that live tongue is all / Dispelled?”
Because a coming prophet is assumed to speak of the highest things,
he or she shall come to warn us that in destroying the planet we destroy
our own souls—not in the usual sense that we won’t physically be able