Poetry and Animals

112POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE

at every step. Consistent with the

formula—warm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and a few

hairs—that

is a mammal; there he sits in his own habitat,

serge-clad, strong-shod. The prey of fear, he, always

curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly

done,

says to the alternating blaze,

“Again the sun!

anew each day; and new and new and new,

that comes into and steadies my soul.”

To prove that the concept of species is still a productive interest
within modernism, and indeed that the species poem is itself a kind of
literary tradition, we can also take note of William Carlos Williams’s
“The Sea-Elephant,” particularly since Williams is a poet committed to
the material and the particular, rather than to the abstract. The poem
presents the sea elephant as specimen and spectacle. As with Moore’s
poems, there is no lyric voice here but rather a multiplicity of voices:
a narrator, a circus barker (“Ladies and Gentlemen! / the greatest
sea-monster ever exhibited / alive”), members of the audience (“They /
ought / to put it back where / it came from”), and strikingly the sea ele-
phant itself (“Blouaugh! (feed / me) my / flesh is riven.”^48 The poem pres-
ents the sea elephant as a monster, its size and strangeness a source of
human curiosity. Its meaning for all the speakers is its physical appe-
tite, signaled by its size and the poem’s vague sexual innuendos. The
human watchers are implicated, however, in making the giant seal a
part of the circus and projecting their own discomfort about natural
desires onto the creature. The irony of the poem is far reaching. It depicts
our interest in the animal as reductive, prurient, and inappropriately
moralizing; this creature has been stolen from the sea for our entertain-
ment, though the speaker knows enough to recall scenes from the seal’s
life in the sea. The poem’s final line—“Spring is icummen in”—is an allu-
sion to “Cuckoo Song,” discussed earlier, and suggests an acceptance