For millennia, poets have tried to explain the animals of their lives. A number of the most well-known verses concern a selected creature—wild or lovely or filthy or dignified—carefully noticed. Take Elizabeth Bishop detailing the shallow, yellowed eyes of her caught fish; Mary Oliver trying up at wild geese sweeping throughout the sky; D. H. Lawrence tenderly cheering on a child tortoise, “a tiny, fragile, half-animate bean.” Coming face-to-face with these unusual beings, so seemingly separate from the human realm, poets have expressed surprise, bewilderment, and generally discomfort. A single animal, in spite of everything, can push us to contemplate our relationship to all species of this world. It might probably make us query how completely different we’re, actually, from the beasts staring again at us.
In “Hens,” the poet Henri Cole appears to ponder simply this. He turns his consideration to a notably unglamorous animal: a squawking, evident pullet named Lazarus. She’s the final one left within the coop, her sisters having presumably been eaten by one other animal. In fact, she will be able to’t change her state of affairs; she simply retains clucking and laying eggs, doomed to ovulate on repeat till she dies. She actually can’t articulate any loneliness or grief. Nonetheless, Cole thinks she appears wounded. Lazarus’s ignorance and incapability to flee her destiny are qualities that may make her appear silly, brutish, and pathetic—however Cole appears to acknowledge them as deeply human.
Identical to any dwelling creature, Lazarus is fleshy, breakable, and weak to intruders. Maybe Cole loves her for that reason: Her helplessness reminds him of his personal. “Sure, sure, every little thing might be / okay,” he tells her. You’ll be able to think about he is perhaps speaking to himself.
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