114POETRY AS FIELD GUIDEthe poet through his encounters with them, and the poems are a mark
the poet leaves of the animals, his mediation of the species into human
culture.
The sheer variety of animals Hughes represents also leads to an enor-
mous variety of forms, modes of symbolism, and voices in his poems.
They are symbolic to varying degrees, revealing species as embodying
ideas of being in the world. While the poems of his Crow series reflect
the animal as fable or trickster, the bird poems of A Primer reflect keen
observation and meditation on specific birds. He said that his poems on
birds involve “an armed truce between the life of energy inside men and
the facts of the world outside, after severe fighting and heavy losses on
both sides.”^52 The poem “Shrike,” from A Primer, is a good example. Like
most of his poems on species, it begins with a specific observation of a
single bird, in this case, one in the act of killing another bird: “The tal-
ons close amicably / Round the accused / And her pipe of cry” (perhaps
alluding to the German name of the bird, which means “choking” or
“death angel”).^53 It takes note of the shrike’s stark beauty, “painted for
war / And recognition,” and hints at one of the most striking features
of the bird—that it frequently impales its prey on thorns. It “digests his
fame” and leaves a “jury of cadavers.” The short poem reveals what
might be the essential paradox of this bird for human observers—that it
looks like a pretty songbird (like a large chickadee) but kills and makes
trophies of other birds. It becomes a symbol in the poem for “the sun’s
justice,” which suggests both that everything dies and that this bird’s
form of killing is highly visible; indeed, unlike many other predators,
who quickly eat what they kill, the shrike leaves an enduring sign of its
predation. This meaning is personal and human; the bird doesn’t see
itself as a symbol, but the poem presents this symbolism as an indisput-
able part of the world.
His poem “Tern” is one of my favorites, in part because the arctic tern
was my own favorite bird as a child. It flies with the agility and speed of
a swallow but is larger, though somehow with a more slender body. With
its simple black-on-white markings, it might have been designed by Jean
Arp. Like “The Jaguar,” this poem begins with a clear act of observing
a single animal, describing the bird darting over the ocean swells at