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Plants, Animals, and (Almost) Humans (Animals (The Goat, Or Who is Sylvia?…

- - - - Ethics: "And I let the fish go." The narrator feels some guilt about his capture of the fish by the end of the poem, and feels compelled to let it go back out into the water. Does this make his actions more humane?
      - Humans vs. Others: I looked into his eyes / which were shallower, and yellowed, / the irises backed and packed / with tarnished tinfoil / seen through the lenses / of old scratched isinglass." Fish are so unlike us that it is hard for us to empathize them. We fish for sport, something we would feel very uncomfortable doing if fish looked more like us.
    - - Humans vs. Others: "She had horses who danced in their mothers' arms... She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet / in stalls of their own making." We know Harjo is not talking about real horses, and must be talking about humans, due to the complexity of the actions and feelings described. We cannot fathom horses doing these things, because they are part of the "other" group.
    - - Natural vs. Artificial: "What can words do / but link what we know / to what we don't, / and so form a shape?" Jellyfish are so different from us, that even our human language cannot fully describe their essence. There is a gap between our words and what they are describing. Doty is saying the natural world is more beautiful without us trying to impose our human language onto it.
    - - Humans vs. Others: He could not plunge into the daylight that streamed at the / window. / It was asking too much of his nature." The man in the poem realizes he has given the bat too much of a human thought process. The bat, in reality, does not think as humans do, and is a totally different being that we do not fully understand, aside from knowing they are different from us.
      - Fate: "The human soil is fated to wide eyed responsibility / in life." Lawrence says that humans are fated to see the world for what it is, unlike animals or plants, who do not have this consciousness. Our fate is to see the consequences of our actions, whether it relates to animal abuse, or something else.
    - - Humans vs. Others: "Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one's scalp / As the bats swoop overhead! / Flying madly." Lawrence suggests an innate discord between humans and bats, as an "other." They do not look like humans, and do not act as such either. Their movements are wild and seemingly random, and they sleep upside down.
      - Narration: Lawrence repeats "Bats!" again and again throughout the poem, to keep the reader on edge, as if a bat were flying around them.
- - - - Humans vs. Others: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / petals on a wet, black bough." Pound blurs the lines between humans and "others" here, as he compares humans rushing around in a subway station to flower petals resting on a branch. Each face rushes by, and all begin to look alike, just as flower petals do.
    - - Sex and Secuality: "You are caught in the drift. / Stunted, with small leaf, / you are flung on the sand, / you are lifted / in the crisp sand / that drives in the wind." The sea rose represents a woman, and H.D. is saying that it is a beautiful thing for women to explore their sexuality and have experiences, even to be a little promiscuous.
      - Natural vs. Artificial: "Can the spice-rose / drip such acrid fragrance / hardened in a leaf?" H.D. asserts that nature is more beautiful when left alone, and must persevere through the elements to survive. She does not see the beauty in the flower shop type of plants that are taken care of by humans.
    - - Love: "Masses of flowers / load the cherry branches / and color some bushes / yellow and some red, / but the grief in my heart / is stronger than they, / for though they were my joy / formerly, today I notice them / and turn away forgetting." The widow's love for her lost husband is so strong, even after his death, that she cannot find beauty in the natural world as she used to.
      - Humans vs. Others: I feel that I would like / to go there / and fall into those flowers / and sink into the marsh near them." While this final line can be interpreted as an ominous reference to suicide, it can also be seen as the widow reuniting with the natural world in order to find her lost happiness.
    - - Gender: "Her body is not so white as / anemone petals nor so smooth." While many poets compare women to flowers, Williams does it in a sort of different way. He says how this woman is not like flowers.
    - - Natural vs. Artificial "O to blot out this garden / to forget, to find a new beauty / in some terrible / wind-tortured place." H.D. finds beauty in all that is natural, even if, or maybe especially if, it does not have the conventional beauty that we assign with more artificial things.