Poetry and Animals

THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY151

insignificant before the creature dies. That is part of why one’s grief at
the actual death of a pet is so unexpected. It is only a dog. It should not
have affected us this much. Moreover, the death of a pet is very often the
first death we encounter, the first corpse we see, the first (and perhaps
only) burial we do ourselves. That the speaker describes her as a “thing”
in the third line has long puzzled readers, but it makes some sense if we
read the poem as about a pet, whose status as animal makes it a thing
to others, a mere animal body. In the poem, “thing” implies kind, a
category of being somehow separate from that of the speaker, in terms
of both mortality and classification. The second stanza too seems apt for
describing how one discusses a dog in the past tense—that it has stopped
moving, that it no longer plays. “Animal movement” is the prime realm
of signification of the beloved animal, and in death it is this meaning
and presence that are lost.^52
A more explicit but similarly concise and devastating poem on the
death of an animal is Philip Larkin’s “The Mower.”

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found

A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind

While there is still time.^53

The poem’s title alludes to Andrew Marvell’s short series of “Mower”
poems, in which the poet poses as a naïve pastoral worker who medi-
tates on love rather than mowing grass with a scythe. Robert Frost too