Poems About Animals ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

Poems About Animals

ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery


Gary Larson’s The Far

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In me is every animal, though I'm not conscious

of it. The animal a person loves most is the part

that is most awake in him.—Karlheinz

Stockhausen


Whenever you observe an animal closely,

you feel as if a human being sitting inside

were making fun of you.—Elias Canetti,

The Human Province


In [the] labyrinth [of the self], where it seems one must trust to blind

instinct, there is, von Franz points out, one only one, consistent rule

or "ethic": Anyone who earns the gratitude of animals, or whom they

help for any reason, invariably wins out. This is the only unfailing

rule that I have been able to find.

Our instinct, in other words, is not blind. The animal does not

reason, but it sees. And it acts with certainty; it acts "rightly,"

appropriately. That is why all animals are beautiful. It is the animal

who knows the way, the way home. It is the animal within us, the

primitive, the dark brother, the shadow soul, who is the guide.—

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Language of the Night


There is a profound, inescapable need for animals that is in all people

everywhere, an urgent requirement for which no substitute exists. It is no

vague, romantic, or intangible yearning, no simple sop to our loneliness for

Paradise. It is as hard and unavoidable as the compounds of our inner

chemistry. It is universal but poorly recognized. It is the peculiar way that

animals are used in the growth and development of the human person, in

those most priceless qualities which we lump together as "mind" . . . Animals

are among the first inhabitants of the mind's eye. They are basic to the

development of speech and thought. Because of their part in the growth of

consciousness, they are inseparable from a series of events in each human

life, indispensable to our becoming human in the fullest sense.—Paul

Shepard, Thinking Animals


She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.Too young to know much, she was beginning to learnTo use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floorAnd to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog! Good dog!"

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skinAnd her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fedAnd sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.We found her twisted and limp but still alive.In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm furAnd my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shameOf diarrhoea and had dragged across the floorTo a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

John UpdikeDog’s DeathJohn UpdikeDog’s Death


Two universes mosey down the streetConnected by love and a leash and nothing else.Mostly I look at lamplight through the leavesWhile he mooches along with tail up and snout down,Getting a secret knowledge through the noseAlmost entirely hidden from my sight.

We stand while he's enraptured by a bushTill I can't stand our standing any moreAnd haul him off; for our relationshipIs patience balancing to this side tugAnd that side drag; a pair of symbiontsContented not to think each other's thoughts.

What else we have in common's what he taught,Our interest in shit. We know its every stateFrom steaming fresh through stink to nature's wayOf sluicing it downstreet dissolved in rainOr drying it to dust that blows away.We move along the street inspecting shit.

Howard NemerovWalking the Dog



His sense of it is keener far than mine,And only when he finds the place preciseHe signifies by sniffing urgentlyAnd circles thrice about, and squats, and shits,Whereon we both with dignity walk homeAnd just to show who's master I write the poem.




They do not live in the world,Are not in time and space.From birth to death hurledNo word do they have, not oneTo plant a foot upon,Were never in any place.For with names the world was calledOut of the empty air,With names was built and walled,Line and circle and square,Dust and emerald,Snatched from deceiving deathBy the articulate breath.But these have never trodTwice the familiar track,Never turned backInto the memoried day.


Edwin Muir, The Animals

All is new and nearIn the unchanging HereOf the fifth great day of God,That shall remain the same,Never shall pass away.On the sixth day we came.


The Sabbath

Waking on the Seventh Day of Creation,They cautiously sniffed the air:The most fastidious nostril among them admittedThat fellow was no longer there.

Herbivore, parasite, predator scouted,Migrants flew fast and far--Not a trace of his presence: holes in the earth,Beaches covered with tar,

Ruins and metallic rubbish in plentyWere all that was left of himWhose birth on the Sixth had made of that dayAn unnecessary interim.

W. H. Auden, “The Sabbath”



Well, that fellow had never really smelledLike a creature who would survive:No grace, address or faculty like thoseBorn on the First Five.

Back, then, at last on a natural economy,Now His Impudence was gone,Looking exactly like what it was,The Seventh Day went on,

Beautiful, happy, perfectly pointless....A rifle's ringing crackSplit their Arcadia wide open, cutTheir Sabbath nonsense short.




For whom did they think they had been created?That fellow was back,More bloody-minded than they remembered,More god-like than they thought.




William Stafford (1914-1993)

William Stafford (1914-1993)

Traveling Through The Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deerdead on the edge of the Wilson River road.It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the carand stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;she had stiffened already, almost cold.I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,alive, still, never to be born.Beside that mountain road I hesitated.


StaffordStafford

Traveling Through The Dark

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;under the hood purred the steady engine.

I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,then pushed her over the edge into the river.


David Bottoms, “Crawling Out at Parties”

David Bottoms, “Crawling Out at Parties”

My old reptile loves the scotch,the way it drugs the cells that keep him cagedin the ancient swamps of the brain.He likes crawling out at partiesamong tight-skirted girls. He takesthe gold glitter of earringsfor small yellow birds wading in shallow waterthe swish of nyloned legs for muskrats in the reedsBut he moves awkwardly in the hardwood forestsof early American furniture, stumbles on grassythrow rugs, and the yellow birdsflutter toward the foggy horizons of the room.Out of date, he just can't swingso slides back always to his antique home,the stagnant, sobering water.


Paul MacLean’s Triune Brain TheoryPaul MacLean’s Triune Brain Theory


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Poems About Animals ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery