Poetry and Animals

116POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE

His meaning has no margin. He shudders

To the tips of his tail-tines.

Momentarily, his lit scrap is a shriek.^54

As in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” to which this poem
subtly alludes, the poem’s muscular language honors and reflects the
meaning of the bird. It reveals the meaning of the bird’s beauty, even as
it explains it as evolutionary adaptation. Or put another way, the poem
articulates the specific physical intelligence of this tern and all terns.
David Abram describes our awe at bird flight as a recognition that it
is “not an isolated mind but rather the sensate, muscled body itself that
is doing the thinking... [a] kind of distributed sentience... [an] intel-
ligence in the limbs,” evolved and learned in the physical world, essen-
tial to survival.^55 The poem reveals this distributed intelligence, as the
bird is at once reduced to harpoon and gimlet and understood as a part
of the wind and ocean: “His meaning has no margin.” The poem too is
just a shriek, “a precarious word,” a gesture of recognition of this mean-
ing, at once revealing and failing to reveal something essential about
the species.
Both “Shrike” and “Tern” draw attention to predation as central to
the natural world and even to beauty, and certainly Hughes, like Rob-
inson Jeffers, writes predominantly about predatory creatures. In his
poem on the nightingale, its song even becomes an instrument of vio-
lence, a “sacred blade / Rending the veils, opening the throb of God,”
though this is also just funny, as are his accounts of the moorhen’s “ner-
vous collapse,” and the tree creeper’s “inchmeal medical examination /
Of the tree’s skin.” Similarly, his accounts of the chipmunk as the “midget
aboriginal American,” of mice as “dear little things,” of gulls as “wing-
waltzing their shadows,” and of weasels dancing as making “brainless
young buck rabbits / Simpering, go weak at the knees” show that his
observations of animals reveal more than just stark truths about death,
violence, and power.^56
Many contemporary poets have similarly devoted much of their cre-
ative lives to documenting the diversity of animal being, including A. R.