POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE107the poem might be thought of as a children’s poem—a primer for
understanding birds at the level of species. The speaker of the poem
insists on various distinct features of the bird that make it readily iden-
tifiable: its yellow feet, orange breast, brown back, black head, and song.
Yet as Aaron Shackelford argues, though the poem seems to insist on
the ease of identifying the bird, it is in fact characterized by “confusion
and misidentification,” hinting at the artifice and challenge of defining
an animal as a species.^40 The poem’s refrain “You’ll know her” quickly
becomes ironic. There is first the strange order of the features; why start
with the feet, surely the least easily seen of the bird’s many features? The
speaker is starting from the ground up, as though cataloging a dead
bird rather than a live one.^41 The description of the foot is also curi-
ously roundabout: this is a foot like a yellow hand but makes less of an
impression on the sand. The second stanza likens the yellow foot to a
rubber boot or perhaps suggests that the upper leg becomes boot-like.
Shackelford rightly notes that the entire poem consists of awkward and
arbitrary anthropomorphic comparisons—the orange breast is a “vest”
under a “jacket,” and the robin’s black head becomes a “cap” that from
a distance could be mistaken for a bare head (presumably because it is
distinct from the jacket and vest). The poem seems finally to insist on
the gap between the imagined bird (the one that will not remain silent,
the abstract conception/memory of the bird, awkwardly reconstructed
in language) and the actual bird, the “other” that produces new song.
We don’t know what we think we know about even the commonest of
wild animals, the poem suggests, even as the complex reality of the ani-
mal is a source of profound interest and delight.
Marianne Moore also wrote dozens of poems on individual species
of animals: “The Buffalo,” “The Frigate Pelican,” “The Jerboa,” “The Pan-
golin,” “The Plumet Basilisk,” and “The Wood-Weasel,” to name a few.
However, these poems allow us to see the identification of species as
poetic work in a modernist context. Her poems are complex attempts to
imagine and investigate both specific species and the species concept
more generally, and she is explicitly more self-conscious, critical, and
even clinical in this project than the romantic poems I have been dis-
cussing. The complexity of her poems arises in part from the fact that her