Kingdom to Refuge: Animals in a World of Poetry
essay by Michael Todd Steffen
First thing on my coffee phone browse this morning, Google Play offers scrolls-full of books and calendars featuring poems about animals. (Last night before bed I had been searching emily dickinson’s riddle poem about a snake—“A narrow fellow in the grass/Occasionally rides…”) Now a horned, spotty ruminant stretches from my book case: Roy Fuller’s Selected Poems, wanting to revisit his “Giraffes,” shoulder-above in my mind’s browser under the entry animal poems.
Reading back through it reminds me of the curious power of my favorite poetry dealing with animals: It is not how these encounters welcome me as a human into a cuddly reflection of myself, but how they stand off, as other, and so reveal themselves in their territories. Fuller’s poem precisely begins by flipping the observer/observed dynamic around. The aloft animals are watching him first:
I think before they saw me the giraffes
Were watching me. Over the golden grass
The bush and ragged open tree of thorn,
From a grotesque height, under their lightish horns,
Their eyes fixed on mine as I approached them…
Fuller’s meditation also importantly brings home how animals already are poetry. They embody already that strange familiarity we share with our domestic companions and wilderness fauna, that dear otherness, tangential connectivity, uncanny communication, weird language. All at once I was thinking of Marianne Moore’s “The Pangolin” and Derek Walcott’s “The Pangolin.” I thought of Rita Dove’s “Canary”—two birds in one thought! I thought of Galway Kinell’s bear, Philip Larkin’s hedgehog, Coleridge’s albatross, Plath’s “starfish that can grow back its arms” and her thundering horse Ariel.
Small wonder poets make so much use of creatures. Look through a favorite poet’s collection, they are likely to include as many titles about animals as about love and loss. Even a fierce contrarian, who insists on avoiding commonplaces, the edgiest, will not resist creation’s providence. When one is boldly importuned by alterity, knack to stand us in our tracks, as Lowell’s skunk in the famous poem, this can work to open us again to another of our ponderous potentials, for being wretched. (Or like the Emperor we go rawly about thinking ourselves in fabulous garb.) Images and statements of a world in alienation and dilapidation precede the epiphany of Lowell’s bewildered standoff:
…the eyesores facing her shore…
the season’s ill…
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill…
where the graveyard shelves on the hill.
My mind’s not right…
I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat;
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church…
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
In poems, which are nominally “made” things, creatures appear as correlatives, witnessing what is—both in their creaturely being, and suggesting the more subtly present, less definite elements about us influencing our lives. Mary Oliver’s subjects in her poem “Crows” thus absorb and refract her observations of a solicitous world with its mascots:
each one loud and hungry,
crossing a field, or sitting
above the traffic, or dropping
to the lawn of some temple to sun itself
or walk about on strong legs,
like a landlord. I think
they don’t envy anyone or anything—
not the tiger, not the emperor,
not even the philosopher.
Why should they?
The wind is their friend, the least tree is home.
Nor is melody, they have discovered, necessary.
Nor have they delicate palates…
I’ve found Oliver’s penetrating lines in my print version of Sept 4, 2023’s The New Yorker, sitting on a bus wondering if the person scrolling on their phone in the seat across from me is reading the online version. Me with the tactile text, I don’t have to scroll past other script to “flip through” the entity of my edition. As with a book of poems, I can jump ahead, go back—enact a little liberty from the constraints of an imposed order this way. I find a REPORTER AT LARGE article by David Grann, the author of Flowers of the Killer Moon, its film version soon to be out in theaters. Grann’s article here is called “The Squid Hunter.”
Back toward the front of the magazine I find a June 12, 1948 article by Vladimir Nabokov on “Butterflies.” Back the other way a good bound, Edmund Wilson’s September 7, 1946 piece on George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Confirming I’m onto something, I now concede to checking the Table of Contents, on page 1. At the top I find this is AN ARCHIVAL ISSUE on ANIMALS.
It’s a brow-raising gesture by The New Yorker we these days are attuned to the planet’s creatures perhaps with a little more sympathy than we have been.
Our cats and dogs (like poems) serve purpose, to be fussed and bothered over and over reminding us the universe is in love with us and, now and then, to communicate some warning to us about danger on their radar, their extraordinarily attuned senses that are extrasensory to us. In this way and in many others, animals importantly remind us of our limits and shortcomings, our need to stand with rather than on top of creation. Long before Einstein the world has been relative, the ant with its might, the moose with its delicate step and long ears twitching.
Still, after our young romance with nature conservation in the 1970s, with the official gestures of The Endangered Species Act, The Clean Air and Clean Water acts, in the hay day of Jacques Cousteau and then Green Peace, there came thudding along sundry movements with their solicitations, reminding us, annoying us, and with their great numbers perhaps giving us a false sense of security, that the problems of a poisoned planet and disappearing species were well in hand, or should be with all this attention. But that hasn’t been the case. The Emperor continues parading himself around.
As ubiquitous fundraising mechanisms have even made us weary and wary of causes not immediately within our reach, the news of planet Earth at large, our home, our garden, not least with climate change and its encompassing implications, is coming home to us all and has in fact telescoped from disconcerting to nightmarish.
The world of the poem, the poem of the world. James Merrill liked the revelations summonsed by flipping those terms around. The sleight of hand goes to the heart of animal poems. For ages, from Noah right up to Ogden Nash, our animals domestic and wild have been drawn on, to illustrate things in human nature, like industry vs. negligence and beauty, our claws, our wings.
Nobody in the 17th century was worried about the drama of life’s survival on the stage of the world. The versed fables of Jean de la Fontaine were certainly deciphered through wolf and lamb for our hunger and aggression vs. our innocence. Still, reading him, one could not help but fall into compassion for bullfrogs who puffed to be bulls, short-jumping foxes eschewing the trellis’s unattainable grapes for sour. When, realistically, the natural world appears abundant with no end in sight, we can accommodate it to the whims allowed by our “nature”.
When we are being convinced otherwise, as to the depletion of our habitat and resources, that works into our poetry to keep us, unlike the Emperor, or the boy who cried Wolf, in touch, honest, with a vision of likely outcomes rather than craning fantasies. In her well-known poem “Morning on the Island” Carolyn Forché, respected also as a humanitarian and environmentalist, sketches a world that strikes us with a solemnness about the future we’re heading for:
The lights across the water are the waking city.
The water shimmers with imaginary fish.
Not far from here lie the bones of conifers
washed from the sea and piled by wind.
Some mornings I walk upon them,
bone to bone, as far as the lighthouse.
A strange beetle has eaten most of the trees.
It may have come here on the ships playing
music in the harbor, or it was always here, a winged
jewel, but in the past was kept still by the cold
of a winter that no longer comes.
The “imaginary fish” that make the water shimmer announce the subjective, wishful part of our brains that want to see the plentiful wellbeing of the world. But a few other details the poem renders up, “the bones of conifers” destroyed by the invasive musical beetle, or indigenous beetle that “was kept still by the cold/of a winter that no longer comes” strike home, ringing true to some looming facts of the condition of our world, a world of chimerical projections with data sheets for corroboration.
In essence, Forché presents us with our wishfulness vs. where we are more likely heading. And in the devastated habitat, the image of a sentient life at the porch step of farewell, in the form of a lone survivor and the last of its species:
There is an owl living in the firs behind us, but he is white,
meant to be mistaken for snow burdening a bough.
They say he is the only owl remaining. I hear him at night
listening for the last of the mice and asking who of no other owl.
Forché rhymes this closing stanza, further admitting the poetry of the poem, the arrangement of details in the vision. What to believe? The choice will be ours, until the objective world undergoes so radical a change as to remove our compass of choices. (A glimpse of this has recently befallen Morocco and Libya.) Importantly, the poet has given us a glimpse at worse-scenario disappearance, an unwanted and therefore difficult vision. It’s what sets us “knowing ones” apart, having so many models of possible outcomes, best and worst, stored in our minds, because we have so many scenarios, so much fiction, so much poetry in mind to consider all the time. And a lot of consideration can figure into the simplest gesture, whether to buy another plastic bottle of water or fill a reusable thermos.
This curiously distinctive feature of choices pulses at the heart of one of my favorite animal poems, Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.” Based perhaps on little more than a saying, “a whale of a story,” “the one that got away,” Bishop elaborates deftly drawing her subject in fine detail and suggestive comparison:
Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
The repetition of “wallpaper” makes something of a Jonah captive of the observer, as from the inside of her kitchen. Particulars from the water world, the barnacles, sea-lice and green weed are woven in to make the occasion vivid and convincing. The line of anecdote, “tremendous” as this fish is said to be, comes to the honesty of hanging
a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely.
Of particular focus is Bishop’s relaying the mutual regard between artist and subject/inspiration:
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little
but not to return my stare.
That slight shift of its eyes, along with its fanning gills “breathing in/the terrible oxygen” make important inclusions to contradict what much else of the poem might be suggesting about Bishop’s catch here, of something dead. The emotional diapason of the poem volleys from extremes to a kind of normal perspective, between excitement and disappointment, the fantastic and the ordinary, with growing focus mostly only to see what is there, perhaps with a little distant admiration, and the realization, seeing the hooks of others lodged into the fish’s mouth, that she is far from unique in the homing of this trophy. The great altruistic choice of Bishop’s is undeniable, when we come back around to the necessity of the fish’s having got away. It is also with a wink of some humor and chagrin, letting her wondrous catch off the hook.
Michael Todd Steffen is the recipient of a Rotary International Fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award. His poems and articles have appeared in journals including The Boston Globe, Taos Journal, E-Verse Radio, The Lyric, The Dark Horse, and North of Oxford. Of his second book, On Earth As It Is, now available from Cervena Barva Press, Joan Houlihan has noted Steffen’s intimate portraits, sense of history, surprising wit and the play of dark and light…the striking combination of the everyday and the transcendent.
