Poetry and Animals

THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY133

seventy lines of the boy-speaker’s “translation” of the bird’s song. These
lines articulate at length the desire and pain of the bird as the boy imag-
ined it, and at least through its unusual rhythms, it will strike readers
either as vaguely protomodern, or absurdly anthropomorphic.

O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!

In the air, in the woods, over fields,

Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!

But my mate no more, no more with me!

We two together no more.

In the context of contemporary anthropomorphism, where talking
animals are often ironic and comic, the pathos of these lines can quickly
turn to bathos for most readers. While this may be impossible to over-
come, we can retrieve some sense of the power of Whitman’s version of
birdsong by recalling the original context. First, Whitman actually does
figure some aspects of mockingbird song in his lines, through the vary-
ing line lengths and the frequent repetition of long and short phrases.
Like these lines, the songs of mockingbirds are enormously varied and
long; they include the songs of other birds, often repeated in snippets
(like rhyming couplets). Second, mockingbirds do mate for life and raise
chicks together, so the story that the boy tells of faithfulness, loss, and
grief bears some semblance to mockingbird behavior. There is at least
the desire here, in both the boy and the adult, to know and represent the
bird that so profoundly affected the poet. What the adult speaker is
marking in the italicized lines is the connection the boy had made with
the bird, his belief that spending hours watching and listening to the
bird has given him a full understanding of its situation. This is an under-
standing only he has, which is true in part because he believes he is the
only one who has truly seen this bird, singled it out for prolonged obser-
vation. The ventriloquized birdsong shows the poet broaching profound
difference and exhibiting a similarly expansive sympathy. It also shows
him, as in section 32 of “Song of Myself,” simultaneously immersed in
human culture and aware of the animal. Most of all, the poem shows
that Whitman imagines individual animals can also understand death