148THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRYcan only imagine and project, and that the emotion he reads in the ani-
mals is foremost an expression of his own response to them. And yet
the two ponies do “come over” to meet the two humans (reminding us
of Frost’s “Two Look at Two”), and one of them “nuzzled my left hand,”
which together with the “light breeze,” a Wordsworthian metaphor of
shared consciousness, “moves me to caress her long ear.” This climactic
moment of contact produces the speaker’s epiphany: “Suddenly I realize /
That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.” These
lines are pure metaphor—we cannot step out of bodies or break into
blossom. They are effective because, like the physical joy they express,
they are mysterious and suggest the felt reality of an impossible trans-
formation. This is a physical response to contact, felt as emotion and
expressed as metaphor, idea, or dream. And yet the effect of such an
encounter, as documented here and in many of the other poems I have
discussed, is undoubtedly real even if it is also mysterious.
I am reminded again of Bishop’s wonderful and insistent question in
response to seeing the moose: “Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this
sweet / sensation of joy?” a question explicitly echoed by Denise Levertov
in her poem “Come Into Animal Presence.”^43 The emotional effect of
physical contact with animals explains the enormous success of animal-
assisted therapy, as well as why pet owners apparently live longer than
those without pets.^44 This power is revealed in the etymological confu-
sion in the word pet, which means to domesticate, make a favorite, and
to stroke.^45 Our bodies yearn for contact, and there is special power in
contact w it h non hu ma n a nima ls, pa r t of t he mea ning of which, Wr ig ht ’s
poem suggests, is that it helps overcome our sense of being alone as
individuals or as a species in the world.^46
Levertov’s poem “The Cat as Cat” addresses this relation to the famil-
iar animal with laconic wit, the title proposing that the speaker will try
to see her cat exactly as it is, though this also means just dropping the
article, from the cat as species to a cat, the one the speaker has “on my
bosom.”^47 The short lyric is full of such oppositions: the cat as sleeping
and purring, as a creature of the home and “squirrel killer,” as animal
and “fur-petalled chrysanthemum,” as physical creature and as “meta-
phor.” The cat is a pet and a wild animal. Its sleeping state is marked also