In folklore and folktale, and in the many kinds of writing which have their roots in that realm, animals help to figure human beings. Those creatures may speak, surprisingly or as a matter of course: the words of Balaam’s ass, in the Book of Numbers, are a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, while Swift’s Houyhnhnms are at it all the time, for the instruction of Gulliver, their crazed convert. But loquacious or not, from Aesop to Orwell, literature’s birds and beasts have been chosen as beings from whom we may take our bearings. What Coleridge calls the ‘shaping spirit of imagination’ often takes its own shape from that other kingdom.
When I try to think about why poetry matters to me, individual lines present themselves, if not as touchstones, at least as striking pieces of evidence: they sing themselves up as claimants. No doubt they take some of their force not only from the whole poems in which they occur but also from the circumstances of their being read or their being remembered, but unless one believes that literature is cordoned off from the rest of experience by a ring of fire, that is exactly what one would expect. And the same is true of entire poems; I do not understand completely why it should be that ‘animal’ poems often have a special appeal, even a special authority, for me, but they do; and they also seem to incorporate much of what I do understand about poetry. So here are three of them, with some reflections on them, and on that incorporation.
The first, by William Matthews, is called
‘Vermin’:
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’
What child cries out, ‘An exterminator!’?
One diligent student in Mrs. Taylor’s
class will get an ant farm for Christmas, but
he’ll not see industry; he’ll see dither.
‘The ant sets an example for us all,’
wrote Max Beerbohm, a master of dawdle,
‘but it is not a good one.’ These children
don’t hope to outlast the doldrums of school
only to heft great weights and work in squads
and die for their queen. Well, neither did we.
And we knew what we didn’t want to be:
the ones we looked down on, the lambs of God,
blander than snow and slow to be cruel.
This is one of the many thousands of modern poems which either are sonnets or are haunted by the ghosts of sonnets.