140THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRYgrand, otherworldly.” The poem explicitly asks the question “Why, why
do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?” The question is
profound—why should an encounter with an animal produce powerful
emotion? Why does it almost invariably do so? Joy suggests a sudden
revelation. The experience of seeing a moose is a rare one, and a moose
is an unusual creature. This moose seems to seek out the encounter,
approaching the bus and sniffing at the hood, presumably not really aware
of the people inside the vehicle. The encounter is highly mediated—it is
dark and the speaker is inside the bus, peering ahead through the wind-
shield. But the sudden union of feeling produced by the encounter is in
sharp contrast to everything the poem has so far described and fore-
grounds the individual animal itself as palpable, real, and yet “other-
worldly.” The poem ends with the bus starting up again, the “craning
backwards” of the observers, and the mixing of the “dim smell of moose”
and the “acrid smell of gasoline,” reflecting how the presence of the ani-
mal is dramatically more powerful than the memory or representation
of it, already polluted by human interference.
The poems I have discussed so far have been about encounters with
wild animals, who are normally more distant from our lives and more
fleeting in their contact with us than domestic animals. Even when t he
poem’s speaker insists on the symbolic or allegorical meanings of
these encounters (as with D. H. Lawrence’s well-known poem “Snake”),
the value of the life of the individual animal can still be felt. This is the
case too in Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Hurt Hawks.” The bird and the
speaker’s experiences with it are repeatedly put to work in the poem
for heavy-handed symbolic meaning—even a hurt hawk knows more
about the “wild God of the world” than most people do, the speaker
insists.^32 Yet in spite of the poem’s obvious symbolic work (further
implied by the title—that this hurt hawk stands for all hurt hawks), the
experience the poem describes is an intense encounter with a specific
bird, and the description and the speaker’s own emotions betray a deep
attachment to it rather than to its symbolic meaning. Thus, although
the speaker insists at first that the injured hawk can live just “a few
days,” he admits that he feeds it for six weeks, even as he says that the
bird approaches him “asking for death.” I read the poem finally as a