POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE111creature is reflected in the sheer amount of detailed description she pro-
vides in the poem’s first six stanzas. These relatively long stanzas give a
visceral sense not just of the animal but of the careful attention the poet
has given to it. The description is precise and detailed. The conspicuous
enjambments, like the arcane comparisons (e.g., the pangolin’s careful
movement to “Thomas- / of-Leighton Buzzard Westminster Abbey
wrought iron vine”), suggest the extraordinary work necessary to bring
this animal properly to view. The challenge of the poem is to make this
strange creature familiar, to reveal that it too has the “fragile grace” of
art and human existence, to which it is repeatedly compared.
The description of the creature also suggests the patience of the poet,
as her gaze wanders over the pangolin’s body, habits, and habitat. We
learn how it eats, that it eats stones as well as ants, that it rolls itself into
a ball when threatened, and that it has “sting-proof scales” and a tail
that is a “graceful tool, as prop or hand or broom or ax.” “To explain
grace requires a curious hand,” Moore states, implicitly comparing her
own account of the animal to those monks who “graced the spires” of
cathedrals with carvings of animals. She carves this animal into paper,
since “the being we call human” is “writing- / master to this world,” and
because the pangolin too is a creature of “exactness” with “certain pos-
tures of a man.” Moreover, man, the poem argues, has many postures like
those of the pangolin, “slaving to make his life more sweet,” working day
and night, “fearful but yet to be feared.” The poem finally constructs a
sense of human identity, not by asserting some essential difference from
other animals, but by turning to another animal and finding essential
similarity in its own distinctness. “Man in all his vileness cannot set aside”
the pangolin’s insularity, determination, and endurance (it is evolution-
arily ancient),^47 and by the end of the poem the grace of the pangolin—
its fitness for and in the world—becomes a base on which to imagine
possible human dignity. The animals merge in the poem’s final stanza,
suggesting that the poem is not finally about defining either the human
or the pangolin, is not either literal or symbolic, but is necessarily both.
Not afraid of anything is he,
and then goes cowering forth, tread paced to meet an obstacle