THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY135quality of Art, a Platonic form of joy and beauty). The contrast to Keats’s
poem lies in how Hardy’s speaker recognizes that the life of the indi-
vidual thrush gives its song meaning. This bird too faces death—it is
old, and the bleak winter will probably kill it. Whatever meaning the
thrush’s song has comes seemingly out of its own desire and joy, in con-
trast to the speaker’s extremely generalized woe. The speaker also sug-
gests that the thrush has access to some other air “wherof he knew / And
I was unaware.” This suggests, on the one hand, a sense of the animal
other, that like Shelley’s skylark the thrush does not “look before and
after, / and pine for what is not.”^24 On the other hand, that the speaker
also immediately finds the bird interpretable suggests that he feels a bond
with it—that they share this space and both live in the face of death,
which is an affliction of the individual creature. Thus, right at the turn of
the century, the poem figures human and animal life together as rooted
in the corporeal being of individual bodies. That all creatures share this
individual life, and face death, ironically suggests some solace.^25
Robert Frost is another major poet who has written many poems of
animal encounter, and who has many poems about animals in general.
The poem “The Pasture” is the introductory work in the edition of his
collected poems (The Poetry of Robert Frost) and is about an interaction
with an individual animal. In it the speaker invites his reader to come
with him to meet the “little calf / That’s standing by the mother.”^26 That
the calf is “so young / It totters when she licks it with her tongue” is a
realistic pastoral detail. It is also an example of and symbol for the kind
of intimate contact with the natural world that Frost’s poetry collection
promises, a promise frequently fulfilled through attention to individual
animals. Some of his most well-known poems center on individual ani-
mals: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” includes the speaker’s
awareness that his horse “must think it strange” that the speaker pauses
on a dark snowy night, suggesting that the horse in some way stands for
normalcy, an individual with clear purpose and agency. “The Wood-Pile”
ends with the speaker contemplating the creator and purpose of a stack
of firewood in “a frozen swamp one gray day” (reminding one of Hardy’s
“Darkling Thrush”), but the center of the poem describes the speaker’s
encounter with a bird whom he finds surprisingly easy to interpret.