Poetry and Animals

78POEMS OF THE ANIMAL

status as a complaint and intervention. The poem is a letter to the ninth-
century Chinese poet who wrote the poem “Setting a Migrant Goose
Free.” The first verse paragraph of Merwin’s poem retells the story of the
earlier one, in similarly direct language, about the poet’s exile and his
purchasing of a goose trapped by boys, saving it from being taken “to
market / to be cooked.”^46 The speaker of Merwin’s poem notes the incon-
clusive ending of Chu-I’s poem, that “you let him go / but then where
could he go in the world / of your time with its wars everywhere.” In the
original the speaker sets the goose free but notes that there are wars
everywhere, with soldiers always on the lookout for food and feathers
for their arrows. The shorter second verse paragraph of Merwin’s poem
turns to the speaker’s present moment, in which he reassures Chu-I that
the goose has found a haven with him, though he has taken on the older
poet’s anxiety about the goose’s future.

I have been wanting to let you know

the goose is well he is here with me

you would recognize the old migrant

he has been with me for a long time

and is in no hurry to leave here

the wars are bigger now than ever

greed has reached numbers that you would not

believe and I will not tell you what

is done to geese before they kill them

now we are melting the very poles

of the earth but I have never known

where he would go after he leaves me

The absence of punctuation of these nine-syllable lines helps to create
an elegiac formality, much like that of Ezra Pound’s imitations of Chi-
nese verse. The didacticism here is muted by the imitation of the origi-
nal, which also speaks of wars and insatiable hunger. The juxtaposition
of time frames makes our own sins (“melting the very poles”) seem both
especially appalling and just another human failing. The goose rather
than the speaker is at the center of the story of Merwin’s poem, standing