While encounters between humans and animals are a popular topic in poetry, the types of interactions and relationships portrayed vary widely. Edna St. Vincent Millay depicts her speaker at a distance from the animals she observes, not only physically but emotionally: the buck's death brings about a muted, musing emotional reaction from the speaker. The poem stresses the gulf in experience between human and animal, even while showing death as a universal. Some other poets, notably Mary Oliver, are also known for depicting these fleeting interspecies meetings. Others, including W.B. Yeats, have focused on the mythological and folkloric resonance of certain animals. Here, we'll examine a few more poems showing various other ways speakers relate to animals—as beloved pets, embodiments of beauty, or catalysts for self-examination.
The eighteenth-century poet Thomas Gray, like Millay, once chose as his topic the death of an animal in his poem "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes." But his approach and tone are altogether different, as is the type of animal he chooses to portray. Gray mimics and satirizes human sentimentality with an emotional speaker, who describes the deceased cat in overwrought language typically associated with love poetry and epic adventures. Gray, for instance, lavishes the cat with praise in the lines "Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,/Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes." The poem ends with the often-paraphrased aphorism "Nor all that glisters, gold." In the context of the work, however, that closing wisdom is something of a joke—a serious philosophical observation formed in reaction to the mildest of tragedies.
John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" has none of the detached levity of Gray's ode: it is instead a tempestuous account of a speaker's desire for connection and beauty. An animal—the nightingale mentioned in the title—prompts the speaker's emotional journey, but the human and the bird never even lay eyes on one another. Instead, it is the song of the nightingale, heard at a distance, that rouses the speaker from a mood of depressed numbness. The speaker associates the bird's song with poetry, beauty, and immortality, so that it fills him in turn with hope and torment. In many ways, since the speaker is affected so deeply by such a small moment of contact, the nightingale of this poem is a product of the speaker's mind as much as it is a character. By the poem's end, when the bird's song has ceased, the speaker wonders if he has dreamed it, asking, "Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?"
More than these other poems, Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" narrates the closest encounter between a person and an animal. Bishop's speaker catches a fish, leading her not only to observe it but to decide its fate. Just as Millay mentions the "wild blood" of the buck, taking note of the ways animals are unfamiliar to humans, Bishop dwells on the alien qualities of the fish. Descriptions like "I looked into his eyes/which were far larger than mine/but shallower, and yellowed,/the irises backed and packed/with tarnished tinfoil" portray the speaker reaching for a connection with the fish even as she takes into account the innumerable divides between herself and the animal. At the poem's end, the speaker decides to throw the fish back into the water, realizing that it has escaped fishing hooks before. She sees its continued escape as a victory, and experiences it as a victory for herself as well, linking her own experiences to that of the animal.
Despite the differences between these poems, all are interested in interrogating the human emotional response to animal lives. All of these works take note of the tension in these relationships—the tendency to feel affected by encounters with a creature deeply different from oneself. Even Gray's work of satire examines this dynamic, noting, albeit sardonically, that people react with seemingly outsize emotions to the lives and deaths of the animals around them. Each poem describes vividly the qualities that make animals strange to the people who meet them. Yet these very qualities seem to loan those animals the capacity to mirror, amplify, and influence human behavior and feelings.
