A Lingua Unicornis: Elizabeth Bishop and Anthropomorphism

In her 1948 essay "As We Like It: Miss Moore and the Delight of Imitation," Elizabeth Bishop focuses on Marianne Moore's animal poems in the section "Miss Moore and Zoography":

This same willingness to do things in such a way as not to show off, not to be superior, is shown in Miss Moore's amazingly uncondescending feeling for animals. … Surely it is also very hard to write about animals without "pastoralizing" them, as William Empson might say, or drawing false analogies.…

… There are morals a'plenty in animal life, but they have to be studied out by devotedly and minutely observing the animal, not by regarding the deer as a man imprisoned in a "leathern coat."

Her unromantic, life-like, somehow democratic, presentations of animals come close to their treatment in Chinese art, and I believe she feels that the Chinese have understood animals better than any other people.

Such are Miss Moore's gifts of portraying animal physiology and psychology that her unicorn is as real as their dragons.…

With all its inseparable combinations of the formally fabulous with the factual, and the artificial with the perfectly natural, her animal poetry seduces one to dream of some realm of reciprocity, a true lingua unicornis.

(Poems, Prose, and Letters 685–86)

There is a fair bit to unpack from these comments but given the increased attention to Bishop's animal poems and reading animal poetry from the perspective of critical animal studies, it is worth doing so carefully. After all, some of Bishop's most masterful works are her animal poems, and her comments on the animal poems of others illuminate her approach to her own animal subjects. This essay reads "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics" as a unique piece among Bishop's animal poems: the only one where she assumes the voices of the animal subjects. I discuss the poem in conjunction with "The Hanging of the Mouse," "Sandpiper," "The Fish," and "Pink Dog" and how these poems engage in a Darwinian anthropomorphism. I argue that "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics" is central to Bishop's animal poetry as her most consistent effort to imagine the subjective experiences and affective states of individual animals. She puts nonhuman animal experiences on par with human experiences of the world, rendering fluid any boundaries between human and animal emotions. Rather than being a merely symbolic or metaphorical trope, this form of anthropomorphism should be aligned with Darwin's study of the expression of emotions in animals and humans as a sincere effort toward a fuller understanding of the human condition, based on the aspects that set humans apart from other species and those humans have in common with other animals.

In her essay on Moore's poetry, Bishop argues against reading animals superficially as metaphors for humans and also advocates observing the animal devotedly and minutely for what they may tell us about "morals." She states that Moore's presentations of animals are "somehow democratic" in their trueness to life, even when the animal in question is fabulous rather than real, and she praises Moore's "uncondescending feeling for animals." The choice of the word "democratic" is striking here. Because Bishop is not speaking of issues of government or rule (by elected representatives of the people) the word invokes its secondary meaning of "egalitarian" or non-hierarchical and of the common people in its derivation of demos meaning "the people" ("Democratic"). I read this observation as an appreciation of writing nonhuman animals in a way that does not posit them solely as metaphors for humans but as individuals in their own right—as people. I do not argue that Bishop meant to attribute legal or moral personhood to nonhuman animals but that she saw and appreciated in animals an individuality and distinct experience of the world—something approaching a metaphysical personhood.

Bishop's choice of the word "presentations" of animals rather than representations is significant in this respect. It suggests that she attempts to show the animal as it really is rather than as merely a figure or image. However, this is a dicey distinction...