Poetry and Animals

POEMS OF THE ANIMAL75

animals “come up to link my lost people / with the patient domestic
beasts of my life.”^40 Animals dead and alive bring back more faded
memories of dead members of her family. “Fact: it is people who fade, /
it is animals who retrieve them.” In this poem animals retain a more
vivid presence than people and seem more of and in the world, even
when they too have died and must be remembered. In part, this is
because the speaker lives in the constant presence of these animals,
while the people she tries to remember were somehow more transient.
Nonetheless, the powerful links between animals and people here are
evidence of the deep connections the speaker feels exist between human
and nonhuman animals. A similar linking of animal and human occurs
in “Telling the Barn Swallow,” a lovely lyric in which the speaker cele-
brates a rare visit from her daughter, who lives in Holland. The bird’s
spectacular flight patterns as it searches for insects to feed its brood
occur when the speaker’s daughter plays the cello and are thus linked
for future retrieval.

I tell the bird to cover well her hatch.

I tell her that this hour

must outlast the pies and the jellies,

must stick in my head like a burdock bur.^41

Richard Wilbur’s poem “An Event” suggests our complex relation
with animals in a concrete image that yields several abstract reflec-
tions. The event described in the poem’s first stanza is the gathering of
“small black birds, intent / On the far south.”^42 The birds are perhaps
swallows, which the speaker hints at later in the poem in a subtle allu-
sion to Keats’s “To Autumn.” The speaker marvels that they should “con-
vene at some command / At once in the middle of the air, at once are
gone / With headlong and unanimous consent.” Who has not seen the
magic of thousands of starlings, each an individual, flying as though
of one mind in a cloud (also called a “murmuration”), what Wilbur
calls a “drunken fingerprint across the sky.” The mysterious relation-
ship between individual and flock leads to reflections on the desire of the