124THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRYend of our meditations about the human-animal boundary, or about
the animal itself, we need to acknowledge that it is important that we
do so and that it brings about its own moral benefits and perils.^9
The poems I survey in this chapter all reflect attention paid to an
individual animal and thus, at the very least, do the crucial work of
“bring[ing] the animal center stage as the main focus of study,” which
Jonathan Burt sees as the way forward for animal studies, as opposed to
“ever more refined and complicated reworking of the categories ‘human’
and ‘animal.’ ”^10 As I noted in previous chapters, the category of poem I
am bringing to attention in this chapter, like all literary genres and ani-
mal genera, has indistinct boundaries, and many poems may be read as
belonging to different categories, depending on the degree to which the
reader allegorizes or generalizes. Thus, to return to one of my earliest
examples, Chaunticleer in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” is
both an early account of a singular rooster (whose agency is at the cen-
ter of the poem’s many thematic concerns) and a complex allegory that
quickly elides any notion of an actual bird. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner” similarly reflects a broad allegory about
the relation of human spirit to other “supernatural” beings and asks us
to consider that wantonly killing a single nonhuman animal might be a
grave crime, worthy of profound punishment. Interestingly, though the
punishment of the ancient mariner hinges on his seemingly unmoti-
vated killing of the albatross, the poem also works hard to reveal how
all individuals (whether human or animal) are connected to (or entan-
gled with, as Donna Haraway suggests)^11 larger communities.
As I have already noted, anthropocentrism is so powerful a frame-
work that we can read nearly any poem about any animal as com-
pletely about humans. We can look at any animal directly and still
see only ourselves. However, there are many poems that make explicit
that they are inspired by, and draw crucial attention to, encounters with
individual animals or animals as individuals. These poems are inspired
by the moral awakening that comes with recognizing an animal as the
subject of a life and reveal the complexity of the sympathetic imagina-
tion that helps to produce this awareness.