Poetry and Animals

POEMS OF THE ANIMAL79

for animals in general, since he survives as an idea and symbol. The last
lines of the poem express profound regret—the speaker has been hang-
ing on to the goose for twelve hundred years or so, the poem suggests,
because of the vague fear of what might happen to it. Human interfer-
ence (including the speaker’s) has made the goose’s natural migrations
dangerous and untenable. It finds a home now not in the world but in
the confined space of captivity and poetry. While of course we know
more about bird migration patterns now than ever, and certainly much
more than in ancient China, it is still true that we can’t really know what
happens to the single bird. More generally, the poem expresses a sense of
fear over the fate of the animal and a futile but sincere desire to cling to it,
a sense that it is still in some way a companion. The poem finally expresses
a deep sense of futility by depicting the saving of a single millennial
goose, but it also acknowledges that fellow feeling (as well as cruelty and
indifference) for animals is itself ancient and enduring.
The urgency of the catastrophe we have inflicted upon animals in
general perhaps tends to make poems on this topic unavoidably didac-
tic. The challenge is one of scale. The sheer number of animals killed
each year for food and the loss of species and animal populations (which
involves failure to reproduce as well as premature mortality) are difficult
for most people to fathom. Indeed, as individuals and communities we
easily ignore these issues. On the one hand, it is undeniably true that non-
human creatures are, as a group, suffering enormously under our domi-
nation of the planet. On the other hand, this group is an abstraction—the
animal as an idea continues to exist no matter what we do to individual
animals and to populations (herds, species, etc.). The challenge for a
poet in addressing this issue is to make animal suffering, our obliga-
tions to the animal, and the very idea of the animal seem concrete. This
is the achievement of the poem “The Animals,” by Australian poet
Geoffrey Lehmann.^47 This free verse poem mixes generalizations about
animals with specific details and examples. Its central trope is the idea
of animals as companions, both in the sense of being domesticated as
companion animals and in the larger sense that we share the planet with
them. The speaker begins by noting the strange nature of our current
relationship with animals; the poem’s first line quotes a classified ad for