Poetry and Animals

THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY139

Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose,” one of several brilliant lyrics of animal
encounter she wrote.^31 The poem is too long and complex for a complete
reading; what interests me is the climax of the poem’s narrative, when
the nuanced evocation of a specific place and time in the life of the
poem’s “lone traveler,” a curiously distanced first-person speaker who
never refers to herself, is interrupted by the appearance of the moose on
the road. The poem is Wordsworthian in being about a halted journey,
in which the speaker is simultaneously brought out of herself and to her-
self. What is interrupted is a web of memory and a fractured but increas-
ingly complex sense of identity produced when the speaker leaves her
grandparents’ home by bus. Before the encounter, the dominant emo-
tions are loss and isolation. The poem is in part about its own ability to
evoke the past, but it also showcases how an unexpected encounter with
a large and unusual animal (contrasted in part by the multiple refer-
ences to dogs in the first part of the poem) manages to interrupt virtu-
ally every aspect of the poem—the bus voyage, the speaker’s isolation
and depression, the narrative the poem seemed to have been telling. The
bus has stopped “with a jolt.” However, what everyone on the bus notes
is the animal itself rather than the catastrophic collision just averted,
and the speaker celebrates this interruption as a new presence.

A moose has come out of

the impenetrable wood

and stands there, looms, rather,

in the middle of the road.

It approaches: it sniffs at

the bus’s hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,

high as a church,

homely as a house

(or, safe as houses).

The bus passengers have all been turned to children, “exclaim[ing] in
whispers, / childishly, softly,” while the moose “looks the bus over, /