There are plenty of poems on the places where human life intersects with the lives of animals. Here are some of my favorites.
William Stafford was an American poet, born in Hutchinson, Kansas. He was a conscientious objector in the second world war, during which he performed some forestry work. He taught at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. This is Traveling Through the Dark from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. You can listen to it here.
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead 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 the glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and 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.
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.
D.H. Lawrence was an English poet, playwright and novelist. Not well-read during his life, he reached his height of fame after a Calvin Klein fragrance commercial. Um… So that’s a lie (I couldn’t resist… Back to something more truthful…) He was harassed by British military authorities during World War I because of his anti-militarism views and wife with German parents, and spent the rest of his days in a sort of voluntary exile which took him to Australia, Italy, United States, Mexico, Sri Lanka and France. I love the character of his poem, Snake. Here, a recording (not his voice).
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From the dark door of the secret earth.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered father,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.
I looked around, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.
I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhing like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.
And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of the accursed human education.
And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
Andrei Voznesensky is a Russian poet, currently living and working in Moscow. He studied to be an architect but eventually turned his full attention to poetry. During the 1960s, he performed for thousands of fans in stadiums, and other large venues, and also traveled through Europe and the United States. Also in the early 1960s, Khruschev led a State-sponsored attack on liberal, modernist writers and artists. During this time, Voznesensky and others were pressured to issue recantations of their previous works, and many books were taken out of print. The relative freedom they once had to travel abroad was suspended and Voznesensky spent many months after this trouble wandering Russia “as a bird diverts the hunters from its nest.” Although his clever rhyme and use of surprising slang and technical jargon cannot be properly translated out of its original form, here is a bit of his work. Hunting a Hare (for my friend Yuri), translated by W.H. Auden. (For those who can read Russian, I’ve included some scans of the original work…)
Hunting a hare. Our dogs are raising a racket;
Racing, barking, eager to kill, they go,
And each of us in a yellow jacket
Like oranges against the snow.
One for the road. Then, off to hound a hare,
My cab driver friend who hates a cop, I,
Buggins’ brother and his boy, away we tear.
Our jalopy,
That technological marvel, goes bounding,
scuttling along on its snow chains. Tallyho!
After a hare we go.
Or is it ourselves we’re hounding?
I’m all dressed up for the chase
In boots and jacket: the snow is ablaze.
But why, Yuri, why,
Do my gun sights dance? Something is wrong, I know,
When a glassful of living blood has to fly
In terror across the snow.
The urge to kill, like the urge to beget,
Is blind and sinister. Its craving is set
Today on the flesh of a hare: tomorrow it can
Howl the same way for the flesh of a man.
Out in the open the hare
Lay quivering there
Like the gray heart of an immense
Forest or the heart of silence:
Lay there, still breathing,
Its blue flanks heaving,
Its tormented eye a woe,
Blinking there on the cheek of the snow.
Then, suddenly, it got up,
Stood upright: suddenly,
Over the forest, over the dark river,
The air was shivered
By a human cry,
Pure, ultrasonic, wild,
Like the cry of a child.
I knew that hares moan, but not like this:
This was the note of life, the wail
Of a woman in travail,
The cry of leafless copses
And bushes hitherto dumb,
The unearthly cry of a life
Which death was about to succumb,
Nature is all wonder, all silence:
Forest and lake and field and hill
Are permitted to listen and feel,
But denied utterance.
Alpha and Omega, the first and the last
Word of Life as it ebbs away fast,
As, escaping the snare, it flies
Up to the skies.
For a second only, but while
It lasted we were turned to stone
Like actors in a movie-still.
The boot of the running cab driver hung in mid-air,
And four black pellets halted, it seemed,
Just short of their target:
Above the horizontal muscles,
The blood-clotted fur of the neck,
A face flashed out.
With slanting eyes set wide apart, a face
As in frescoes of Dionysus,
Staring at us in astonishment and anger,
It hovered there, made one with its cry,
Suspended in space,
The contorted transfigured face
Of an angel or a singer.
Like the long-legged archangel a golden mist
Swam through the forest.
“Shit!” spat the cab driver. “The little faking freak!”:
A tear rolled down the boy’s cheek.
Late at night we returned,
The wind scouring our faces: they burned
Like traffic lights as, without remark,
We hurtled through the dark.
Tags: andrei voznesensky, animal, d.h. lawrence, deer, hare, poetry, russian, snake, william stafford
