Poetry and Animals

102POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE

into an exploration of the boundaries of type, of what makes this indi-
vidual bird an example of its species, which can only be understood by
comparing it to other classes.
This exploration of types is also at the heart of “The Wryneck’s Nest.”
The sonnet’s form implies completeness, an implicit ideal of the act of
species definition, and the poem is indeed filled with information that
would allow us to identify the bird.

That summer bird its oft repeated note

Chirps from the dotterel ash and in the hole

The green woodpecker made in years remote

It makes its nest—where peeping idlers strole

In anxious plundering moods—and bye and bye

The wrynecks curious eggs as white as snow

While squinting in the hollow tree they spy

The sitting bird looks up with jetty eye

And waves her head in terror to and fro

Speckled and veined in various shades of brown

And then a hissing noise assails the clown

And quick with hasty terror in his breast

From the trees knotty trunk he sluthers down

And thinks the strange bird guards a serpents nest^31

The wryneck is a kind of woodpecker but is also curiously snakelike in
appearance and behavior. This confusion of types is what frightens the
clown intent on stealing eggs. We prefer our species to be distinct and
boundaries between them firm, preferences Clare’s animal poems both
affirm and undermine. The poem celebrates this strangeness of the
bird as what marks its distinctness as a species, though in doing so it
also removes the confusion, potentially making the reader a better wry-
neck egg thief. A striking feature of many of Clare’s animal poems is that
they include an account of human threats to the animal—often boys
stealing nests and eggs, but also, as in “The Nightingale’s Nest,” the
poet himself, whose actions as a guide to others threaten the security of
the nightingale guarding her nest.