Poetry and Animals

POEMS OF THE ANIMAL63

humanity. In this case, though, the narratorless poem is explicitly aware
that how we understand animals as a broad group reflects a deeper cul-
tural truth. In setting up a contrast between “that country” and “this
country,” Atwood is perhaps alluding to Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,”
in which “that country” is characterized by songs that celebrate the
immediacy of “the salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas / Fish, flesh,
or fowl... / Whatever is begotten, born, and dies,” as opposed to Byzan-
tium, which is a world of ideality and art, “[un]fastened to a dying ani-
mal.”^19 While Yeats sets up a contrast between recognition and denial of
the animal, Atwood’s poem reflects the contrast between Old World and
New World attitudes to animals. “In that country the animals / have
the faces of people,” which is to say, in Europe animals are so intimately
a part of culture that they have long been anthropomorphized, so that
“the fox run / politely to earth” and the “bull, embroidered / with blood
and given / an elegant death... / is really a man.” In European culture,
the poem argues, these animals have been fully inhabited by the human
imagination, reflecting a long history. “In this country,” on the other
hand (presumably Atwood’s native Canada),

the animals

have the faces of

animals.

Their eyes

flash once in car headlights

and are gone.

Their deaths are not elegant.

They have the faces of

no one.^20

In the context set up by the poem the animals of “this country” seem
poorly done by. They have not yet been integrated into art, made
human, or given ceremonial deaths. However, there is a deep irony in the