The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

The romantic encounter of man and beast. In such an encounter, the animal provides an accidental stimulus to the thoughts and emotions of a human individual. As a rule, the characteristics of the animal which make it a stimulus are not those in which it resembles man—as in the epic simile—but those in which it is unlike him. A man whose beloved has died or left him, hears a thrush singing and the song recalls to him an evening when he and his beloved listened together to another thrush singing. There are two thrushes and one man, but, while the songs of the two thrushes are identical— thrush-life does not change and knows nothing of unhappy love—the man hearing the second is changed from what he was when he heard the first. Since, in these encounters, the nature of the animal itself has little, if anything, to do with the thoughts and emotions he provokes in the human individ­ual, realistic description counts for little. Very few of the famous romantic poems concerned with animals are accurate in their natural history.

Animals as objects of human interest and affection. Ani­mals play an important economic role in the lives of hunts­men and farmers, many people keep them as pets, every major city in our culture has a zoo where exotic animals are on public exhibition, and some people are naturalists who are more interested in animals than in anything else. If an animal lover happens also to be a poet, it is quite possible that he will write poems about the animals he loves and, if he does, he w^Till describe them in the same way that he would describe a friend, that is to say, every detail of the animal's appearance and behavior will interest him. It is almost impossible to make such a description communicable to others except in anthro­pomorphic terms, so that, in the animal lover's poetry, the order of the Homeric simile is reversed and takes the form:

as n looks or acts so does A

where n is a typical class of human being and A is an indi­vidual animal. Its grace and charm are conveyed by likening it to some instance of what makes some human beings admir­able; sometimes, too, like Lawrence, the animal lover goes further and contrasts the virtue of a beast with the vices and follies of man.

Overtly, Miss Moore's animal poems are those of a naturalist; the animals she selects are animals she likes—the one excep­tion is the cobra, and the point of the poem is that we, not the cobra, are to be blamed for our subjective fear and dislike— and nearly all of her animals are exotic, to be seen normally only in zoos or photographs by explorers; she has only one poem about a common domestic pet.

Like Lawrence, she has an extraordinary gift for meta­phorical comparisons which make the reader see what she has seen. The metaphors may be drawn from other animals and plants. Thus, she describes a tomcat's face:

the small tuft of fronds or katydid-legs above each eye, still numbering the

units in each group; the shadbones regularly set about the mouth, to droop or rise in unison like the porcupine quills—motionless.

The firs stand in a procession, each with an

emerald turkey-foot at the top, reserved in their contours, saying nothing

the lion's ferocious chrysanthemum head Or the metaphors may be taken from human artifacts.

pillar body erect on a three-cornered smooth-working chippendale claw.

("The Jerboa.")

the intensively watched eggs coming from the shell free it when they are freed, leaving its wasp-nest flaws

of white on white and close- laid Ionic chiton-folds like the lines in the mane of a Parthenon horse

("The Paper Nautilus.")

And on occasion, she uses an elaborate reversed epic simile.

As impassioned Handel— meant for a lawyer and a masculine German domestic career—clandestinely studied the harpsichord and never was known to have fallen in love,

the unconfiding frigate-bird hides in the height and in the majestic display of his art.

("The Frigate Pelican.")

But, unlike Lawrence, she likes the human race. For all the evil he does, man is, for her, a more sacred being than an animal.

Bedizened or stark naked, man, the self, the being we call human, writing— master to this world, griffons a dark

"Like does not like like that is obnoxious"—and

writes error with four r's. Among animals, one has a sense of humour,

Humour saves a few steps, it saves yours. Unignorant, modest and unemotional, and all emotion, he has everlasting vigour, power to grow

though there are few creatures who can make one breathe faster and make one erecter.

The approach of her poetry is that of a naturalist but, really, their theme is almost always the Good Life. Sometimes, as in the bestiaries, she sees an animal as an emblem—the devil­fish, so frightening to look at, because of the care she takes