POETRY IN LOCKDOWN: 15

Judging by one or two videos circulating during lockdown, animals around the world are enjoying life with hardly any humans about in the streets and city parks. So let's turn to some poems about animals. English poetry has been reckoning with the animal world, and with human interference in it, since the so-called romantics first began looking at nature, not as allegory or moral fable, but in itself. They discovered that real nature poetry is not about projecting the human into the beast but about locating the beast in ourselves, and in charting our place in relation to nature and its creatures.

 Some of the best poems about nature and beasts come in the form of little dramatisations of chance encounters with animals.  Here is one in which the American Theodore Roethke (whose portrait shown here is by Mike Nease) stumbles upon a field mouse and offers it a home. 

The Meadow Mouse
by Theodore Roethke

                                    I

In a shoe-box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,
Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,
Cradled in my hand,
A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon mouse,
His feet like small leaves,
Little lizard feet,
Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,
Wriggling like a miniscule puppy.

Now he’s eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his
            bottle cap watering-trough——
So much he just lies in one corner,
His tail curled under him, his belly big
As his head, his bat-like ears
Twitching, tilting towards the least sound.

Do I imagine he no longer trembles
When I come close to him?
He seems no longer to tremble.

                                    II

But this morning the shoe-box house on the back porch is empty.
Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm?——
To run under the hawk’s wing,
Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,——
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.