Poems About Animals
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Transcript of Poems About Animals
Poems About Animals
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Gary Larson’s The Far
Side
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
ENGL 2030—Fall 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
ENGL 2030—Fall 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
ENGL 2030—Fall 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
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.Too young to know much, she was beginning to learnTo use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floorAnd 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 skinAnd her heart was learning to lie down forever.
Monday morning, as the children were noisily fedAnd 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 furAnd 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 shameOf diarrhoea and had dragged across the floorTo a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.
John UpdikeDog’s Death
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Two universes mosey down the streetConnected by love and a leash and nothing else.Mostly I look at lamplight through the leavesWhile he mooches along with tail up and snout down,Getting a secret knowledge through the noseAlmost entirely hidden from my sight.
We stand while he's enraptured by a bushTill I can't stand our standing any moreAnd haul him off; for our relationshipIs patience balancing to this side tugAnd that side drag; a pair of symbiontsContented 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 stateFrom steaming fresh through stink to nature's wayOf sluicing it downstreet dissolved in rainOr drying it to dust that blows away.We move along the street inspecting shit.
Howard NemerovWalking the Dog
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
His sense of it is keener far than mine,And only when he finds the place preciseHe signifies by sniffing urgentlyAnd circles thrice about, and squats, and shits,Whereon we both with dignity walk homeAnd just to show who's master I write the poem.
Howard NemerovWalking the Dog
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
David Bottoms, “Crawling Out at Parties”
My old reptile loves the scotch,the way it drugs the cells that keep him cagedin the ancient swamps of the brain.He likes crawling out at partiesamong tight-skirted girls. He takesthe gold glitter of earringsfor small yellow birds wading in shallow waterthe swish of nyloned legs for muskrats in the reedsBut he moves awkwardly in the hardwood forestsof early American furniture, stumbles on grassythrow rugs, and the yellow birdsflutter toward the foggy horizons of the room.Out of date, he just can't swingso slides back always to his antique home,the stagnant, sobering water.
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery
Paul MacLean’s Triune Brain Theory
ENGL 2030—Fall 2013 | Lavery