POEMS OF THE ANIMAL57tensions within and between humans and animals in general. Animal
allegories involve abstraction and thus produce representations and
implicit comparisons in terms of broad categories. We can see this too in
a number of other allegorical poems, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” perhaps the best known animal poem
in the English language. The poem has been read allegorically in an
astonishing variety of ways; part of what makes it such an open-ended
and multivalenced work is that it is conspicuously ambiguous. Though
the story the mariner tells is vivid, it is nonetheless difficult to say what
the poem is literally about. Its realistic frame is about storytelling, but the
mariner’s story becomes increasingly fantastic and repetitive, of cycles
of punishment and apparent or momentary reprieves. One of the cen-
tral effects of the poem on the reader, and its narrator-auditor, is to blur
the distinction between natural and supernatural, literal and symbolic,
so that our interpretive impulses are given a broad range. Yet the poem
is, among other things, an animal poem in that the climax of the mari-
ner’s story is his inexplicable killing of the albatross, so that all that
follows can be read as a consequence of this act of malice on a represen-
tative of the animal world. Indeed, the mariner himself interprets his
story this way (“He prayeth well who loveth well / Both man and bird and
beast” [612–13]), which has led several critics to see the work as an early
example of a poem that takes seriously our obligations to other kinds of
life.^10 I don’t want to rehearse those readings here—just to show that the
poem’s allegory, its inherent abstraction, allows us to read it as broadly
about animals as a collective, “all creatures great and small,” as the mar-
iner says. This reading is supported too by the fact that the mariner’s
initial rehabilitation begins at the moment he finds himself able to feel
a spontaneous current of love for the “water snakes” that surround his
ship. Read as about animals and human obligations toward them, the
poem asserts that nonhuman animals are part of a mysterious and
sentient order to which humans also belong, thus blurring boundaries
between human consciousness and other species of it.
Obviously, animals occupy only a small fraction of the poem’s lines
and concerns, but the poem figures the animal as pivotal in order to say
something about the human condition. Thus the poem is more clearly