Poems About Animals

1. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Poems About Animals

2. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

3. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

4. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

5. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

6. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

7. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

8. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

9. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

10. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

11. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

12. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

13. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

14. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

15. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

16. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

17. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

18. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

19. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Gary Larson’s The Far Side

20. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery 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

21. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery 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

22. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery 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

23. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery 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

24. She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car. Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor And 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 skin And her heart was learning to lie down forever. Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed And 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 fur And 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 shame Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog. John Updike Dog’s Death ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

25. Two universes mosey down the street Connected by love and a leash and nothing else. Mostly I look at lamplight through the leaves While he mooches along with tail up and snout down, Getting a secret knowledge through the nose Almost entirely hidden from my sight. We stand while he's enraptured by a bush Till I can't stand our standing any more And haul him off; for our relationship Is patience balancing to this side tug And that side drag; a pair of symbionts Contented 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 state From steaming fresh through stink to nature's way Of sluicing it downstreet dissolved in rain Or drying it to dust that blows away. We move along the street inspecting shit. Howard Nemerov Walking the Dog ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

26. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery His sense of it is keener far than mine, And only when he finds the place precise He signifies by sniffing urgently And circles thrice about, and squats, and shits, Whereon we both with dignity walk home And just to show who's master I write the poem. Howard Nemerov Walking the Dog

27. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery They do not live in the world, Are not in time and space. From birth to death hurled No word do they have, not one To plant a foot upon, Were never in any place. For with names the world was called Out of the empty air, With names was built and walled, Line and circle and square, Dust and emerald, Snatched from deceiving death By the articulate breath. But these have never trod Twice the familiar track, Never turned back Into the memoried day. Edwin Muir, The Animals

28. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery All is new and near In the unchanging Here Of the fifth great day of God, That shall remain the same, Never shall pass away. On the sixth day we came.

29. W. H. Auden, “The Sabbath” The SabbathWaking 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. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

30. 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. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

31. W. H. Auden, “The Sabbath” 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. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

32. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery William Stafford (1914-1993) Traveling Through The DarkTraveling 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.

33. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery Stafford 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.

34. David Bottoms, “Crawling Out at Parties” My old reptile loves the scotch, the way it drugs the cells that keep him caged in the ancient swamps of the brain. He likes crawling out at parties among tight-skirted girls. He takes the gold glitter of earrings for small yellow birds wading in shallow water the swish of nyloned legs for muskrats in the reeds But he moves awkwardly in the hardwood forests of early American furniture, stumbles on grassy throw rugs, and the yellow birds flutter toward the foggy horizons of the room. Out of date, he just can't swing so slides back always to his antique home, the stagnant, sobering water. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

35. Paul MacLean’s Triune Brain Theory ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery