Seeing in Nature What Is Ours: Poetry and the Human-Animal Bond

According to the familiar lines of William Wordsworth,The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:Little we see in Nature that is ours.George 349The words of the great poet speak even more urgently to our time than his own. For the destructive effects of the industrial age, which Wordsworth so eloquently lamented at the beginning of the 19th century, have now all but engulfed us as we step forward into the new millennium.But as humankind moves farther and farther from our roots in nature, we seem to cling more tenaciously to our ancient bond with other living beings. As our everyday lives distance us more completely and alienate us more irrevocably from contact with animals, our psyches yearn more intensely for our lost unity with the myriad living creatures with whom we share the earth. Yet the inexorable intellectual heritage and social conditioning of the Western world has trained us to divorce the seer from the seen, to separate the subject from the observer. For those who would restore, preserve, and enhance the human bond with animals, the question arises as to how best to break the spell of Cartesian dualism that has so long possessed our minds, permeating our culture and controlling our cognitive and physical worlds. How can we become free from the force that holds us hostage to constrictions which allow us only an incomplete vision of the existing universe? Worshipping at the shrine of science, have we neglected other vital deities that are not competitive with, but rather complementary to, that omnipotent god of pragmatism?Will the human bond with other species bear only the grinding down of the analytical pestle in the mortar of logic, will it stand revealed by changes in the disks of the Petri dish, or become illuminated solely by the Bunsen burner of rationality? Can it be read by a kymograph, charted on a graph? Is it dependent upon the measurements of a sphygmometer, does it rise and fall with systole and diastole, is it explainable through measuring the pulse beat? What is our stake in this bond, anyway, that we should presume to whirl it in the centrifuge of analysis as though it were a serum sample rather than a blood tie between kin?It is clear that although science may reveal its skeletal outlines, the meaning of the human-animal connection must be fleshed out through reference to other spheres. Humankind is not the exclusively rational, materialistic being as is sometimes assumed, and our bond with animals emanates partly from the deep levels of our consciousness, originating from the same kind of experience as myth, folklore, and poetry, whose languages are symbolic. Tapping into a special aspect of the psyche, these forms of expression articulate truths that are more profound than observable "fact " Theirs is the same domain of cosmic knowing where the "bee's wisdom" lies and where animals communicate with humanity in terms of the language of universal understanding (see Lawrence). "What the bee knows," P.L. Travers reveals with deep insight, is "a wisdom of the ages, a time-honoured wisdom from a timeless source. Unlike the ephemeral knowledge of modern man, the bee's wisdom is one with the fount of all things and transcends the mirage of man's achievement." It is "the wisdom that sustains our passing life" (90, 306). Long before modern science confirmed the bees' remarkable abilities to symbolize and communicate, poets were already aware of them.Of all the forms which celebrate and illuminate the bond between animals and people, poetry possesses the most immediacy. Its expressions are composed of spontaneous outflows of affirmation for life, untempered by dependent variables. The symbolizing of animals that is peculiar to poetry contributes an essential key to the age-old search for "man's place in nature." In poetic terms, animals may take on human qualities and humans may take on animal qualities. …