Towards a Creaturely Elegy

For Lucy Talisker Rae, 2004–2024

After years of teaching and writing about elegy I’ve concluded that this is work in which the intellectual and the personal are deeply intertwined. Many of the colleagues with whom I collaborated on Modernism and Mourning (2007) were motivated in their work, as was I, by their own experiences with grief. Many of my students have told me about the solace they have found in the elegiac poems and memoirs we’ve studied. When preparing to present a literary studies perspective at an interdisciplinary conference on “Death and Dying” in 2018, I sought to widen my understanding of mourning by studying the manuals consulted by bereavement therapists. Those clinical accounts of grief taught me not to overestimate the utility of poetic elegies. At the same time, they seemed impoverished, lacking the poems’ nuance and depth of insight. That comparison strengthened my resolve that literary scholars can help those suffering through grief by sharing elegies with them. After all, mourners have often turned to poetry. When we lose someone dear to us, often words “provide our only comfort.”  We “reach for poetry just as we do for food.”[1]

I’ll acknowledge that the present essay is motivated by a personal loss: the recent death of my beautiful calico cat Lucy, my precious companion for twenty years. Some readers might object that the timely loss of a pet does not deserve this much attention. There will be others, though, whose hearts will catch at the very thought of losing their own animal companions. They will know what bereavement specialists have confirmed: that this kind of grief can hit as hard, sometimes even harder, than that for a beloved human.[2]

My first response to Lucy’s death was to search for an appropriate elegy, but the anthologies yielded none specifically addressing the loss of a pet, and the familiar elegies for humans felt inappropriate. So I began searching for individual pet elegies. I also investigated what therapists, veterinarians, animal studies scholars, journalists, and bloggers say about mourning pets. And as a scholar of literary modernism, I sought to ascertain whether modern elegy had anything distinctive to offer. 

Are “pets” “grievable”?

 I’ll admit I struggled with the idea that, in mourning Lucy, I was mourning a “pet.” The label seemed reductive, casting her as an object, rather than a subject with whom I’d had a mutual relationship. It also failed to capture the tenderness I felt for her, especially in her old age. So while I settled on the word out of practical necessity I did so only provisionally: the elegies for “pets” I was searching for would have to honour their agency and their vulnerability.

Those poems also had to address a painful paradox. Losing a pet can precipitate “a crisis beyond normal grief,” yet it can also be isolating, regarded with indifference, even derision; after all, it isn’t as if a human has died.[3] Those who deeply mourn their pets are often “infantile[zed] and pathologized,” dismissed as anthropomorphizing their animals.[4] Their mourning is “disenfranchised,” in the sense that it is denied the protocols that assist with “translat[ing] grief into acceptance.”[5] The question of whether pets are “legitimate objects of grief” inevitably takes us to Judith Butler’s famous observation after 9/11 that public discourse recognizes only certain lives as “grievable.”[6] At the time, Butler’s insight unleashed waves of activism aimed at broadening the category of “grievability,” but these included only othered humans: it took some time before the campaign extended to non-human animals.[7] This campaign has focused on dissolving the rigid distinction between animals and humans characteristic of “speciesism” and substituting a category important to Heidegger, Rilke, and Agamben: the “creaturely.”[8] This designation encompasses both animals and humans on the grounds of what they share (the condition of having a temporal body; of being a feeling and willing subject) or what they have the capacity to share (for instance, processing the world without abstract ratiocination).[9] The concept of the “creaturely” has been consequential in both environmentalist causes and legal activism on behalf of animals. My interest here is in its potential for helping those mourning their pets—those whose grief is often made worse by external (and internalized) speciesism.

  The disenfranchisement of mourning for pets in the West has a long history fueled by human exceptionalism:  notably, by the Aquinian doctrine that animals have no souls and the Cartesian position that they do not reason and are therefore not conscious subjects. Romantic and Victorian elegies for pets display an emerging counter-discourse against these views, but also a compulsion to answer critics even as they mourn – a variety of “double-consciousness.” [10]   The finest such elegy I’ve found is Thomas Hardy’s tribute to his beloved cat Snowdove. “Last Words to a Dumb Friend” (1904) opens with an unapologetic declaration of sorrow:  “Pet was never mourned as you, / Purrer of the spotless hue.”[11] Memories of the cat’s body haunt the speaker with such painful specificity that he longs to erase them, but concrete physical traces (fur on a favourite chair, scratches on a pine-tree) make forgetting impossible, precipitating a vow never to move on: “Never another pet for me! / Let your place all vacant be” (Hardy, “Last Words”). A challenge to the demeaning labels others might attach to Snowdove elevates the poem from the personal to the philosophical. Its title acknowledges claims that the cat was merely “dumb” (stupid, lacking consciousness, incapable of speech), while its text offers evidence to the contrary: Snowdove was, in fact, a wily subject, who “humoured” his humans’ ways, chose his own path, and expressed himself with a commanding voice. In the devastating final verse, visual memories mingle with the recognition of an awful truth: that this beloved feline subject has become a “thing,” in death. The speaker pictures him bounding to his favourite spot at the window and sees as if through his eyes at the “small mound beneath the tree” where he now lies, inert. Death’s transformation of subjects into objects is a recurring theme in anti-elegies highlighting the devastating cost of war. In underscoring this transformation in Snowdove, Hardy puts the loss of his pet on par with that of a human being.   

Before sharing the other elegy I have found fitting for Lucy, I’ll offer some thoughts about the potential of modern elegy and modernist poetics for mourning our pets.  

Anti-elegy and Creaturely Elegy

Modern elegy is often characterized as anti-elegiac: that is, as refusing “success” in “the work of mourning.”[12] Its “resistant mourning” takes different forms, the purpose of which is to demonstrate one or both of a refusal or an inability to “move on.” For many theorists and critics, anti-elegy’s provocation of melancholic discomfort ties it to ethical, progressive social change. [13]

One strain of modern anti-elegy works by refusing the consolation of conventional mourning rituals: it is what we see in World War I anti-elegies expressing contempt for monuments of “peace-complacent stone” or “marshalled woe.”[14] This variety of anti-elegiac discourse is ill-suited to the project of mourning animals. Rejecting public mourning is a privilege afforded only to those to whom these are available in the first place. 

Another strain of modernist anti-elegy works by displaying the psychological experience of melancholia. Melancholic anti-elegies often capture an impasse over memory of the sort seen in the elegy for Snowdove: a desire to forget, a concern that forgetting is betrayal, an inability to forget even if one wants to.[15]Another trademark is a refusal of consolatory metaphors for the lost loved one, as if these amount to the premature substitution of a “new object” for the mourner’s love.[16]  Melancholic anti-elegies focus, instead, on the vulnerable body; they underscore the finality of death and the reality of decay. My search for modern pet elegies led me to a number of poems along these lines: proleptic elegies whose speakers register the meaning of a thinning body, or linger on graphic memory-images from a heartbreaking last visit to the vet. This sort of anti-elegy speaks to the immense tenderness pet lovers feel toward their animals’ bodies. Though I’m restricting the scope of this essay to elegies for pets, we should note the importance of similar anti-elegiac strategies in writing advocating for non-domesticated creatures. For the millions of animals sacrificed annually for human desires and capitalist interests, consolatory elegies serve the status quo: animal deaths are justified by their service to humans. Resistant elegies make all that loss of life feel unbearable, catalysing remedial action.

The propositions, first, that animals are grievable and, second, that we shouldn’t hurry to heal the grief we feel for their loss, bring us to the concept of a “creaturely poetics.” Advocates for animals have recommended enlisting a poetics that accepts these as premises. Another defining feature of a creaturely poetics (or “zoopoetics”) is that it highlights what animals and humans share – the very definition of the “creaturely.” Ideally, creaturely writing will also aspire to embody creaturely experience in its form.[17]

Commentators on creaturely writing often point to Rilke’s eighth Duino elegy (1922), a poem that consoles for animals’ deaths by remembering their “openness” towards experience, an orientation human children share but lose as they age.  The poem challenges speciesism both by highlighting a creaturely attribute and by representing rationality and self-consciousness—often taken as marks of human superiority—as disadvantages in facing mortality.[18] It argues, compellingly, that a dying animal may feel a decline in physical strength but does so without the fear of an adult human in the same position. A notable weakness of Rilke’s elegy, though, is that it presents its case in the kind of abstract philosophical language deployed only by humans.  specifying abstract categories and distinctions. [19] I’d submit that there are better examples of creaturely elegy in poems whose formal innovations embody creaturely experience. 

While innovations like vers libre, shifting perspective, and pictorial typography exemplify this phenomenon, the device I’ll single out for discussion is the Imagist (or Imagiste) “Image.”[20]   Though the point is often overlooked, the poetics of Imagism came out of a larger movement recoiling from human-specific kinds of reasoning; its key stylistic features were meant to reflect a kind of cognition typical of animals. T. E. Hulme, for instance, in his notebooks, calls for a poetry of “human animals.”  He envisions the ideal poet “judg[ing] the world from the status of animals, leaving out ‘Truth,’ etc.”[21] Poetry, he says, should eschew the philosophical reasoning exclusive to humans—ratiocination in “flat counter-images”—in favor of a creaturely logic based on “solid images” (Hulme, Collected Writings, 30). Like other modernist writers critical of abstract reasoning, Hulme was indebted to the anti-intellectualist philosophies of Nietzsche, Bergson and William James, but he was also inspired by nineteenth-century studies of the mental evolution of animals and humans: most notably, those of Georges John Romanes and Théodule Ribot. These theorists had described a creaturely alternative to abstract reasoning involving a mental “image” positioned somewhere in-between a sense impression and a concept: an entity capturing a type of thing without being attached to a word.[22] This “recept,” “generic image,” or “Image” is essential to animal reasoning, but also instrumental in the lives of human children and “primitive” peoples. [23] It isolates attributes of special interest or utility, facilitating the recognition of analogies that in turn serve as guides to action. Thirsty dogs with a certain “recept” will investigate furrows because they resemble water-troughs; human babies will approach all glass bottles as if they are feeding-bottles.[24] The accounts of “reception” Hulme read in Ribot and Romanes were part of a larger rebuttal of the Cartesian claim that only humans reason. Their point was that animals reason too, just not with concepts attached to words (“la pensée symbolique”): that they reason instead with “analogies,” or according to the “logique des images” (Ribot,  L’Evolution, 147, 33). When adult humans revert to this kind of receptual logic, Ribot and Romanes added, they will discover that it ignites the creative imagination.[25]

This is what Hulme has in mind in calling for a poetry of “human animals” (Hulme, Collected Writings, 14). His notes repeat Ribot’s and Romanes’ accounts of the “logique des images” and their view that the perception of analogy could be a catalyst for poetry:   

Animals are in the same state that men were before symbolic language was invented.

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the

Of two different images.

Thought is the joining together of new analogies, and so inspiration is a matter of

an accidentally seen analogy or unlooked-for resemblance. (14, 29, 30)

The upshot is Hulme’s consequential instruction to poets to deploy “solid images” rather than abstract “counters” in poetry (17, 30). Where the former preserves  “the wealth of nature,” he says, the latter presents only an attenuated facsimile—a “thin shadow of words” (31). Of accounts of nature set out in conceptual “prose” he asks: “What would an intelligent animal (without the language disease) . . . think of it all?”[26]   The poet should approach the world like an “intelligent animal”—be like a “cat at night walking by Marylebone Station” (Hulme, Collected Writings 8). When struck by an analogy, he should recreate it in an arrangement of “solid images,” inviting readers to share “the view” (29).

These are Hulme’s hopes, anyway, for the Imagist poem: a cluster of analogous images, meant to spark insights like “[f]ire struck between stones” (26). The “Image,” as Pound later calls it, in recreating “reception,” is a means of embodying creaturely subjectivity in style.[27] Pound improved on Hulme’s Imagist poetics by injecting motion into Images, in keeping with Fenollosa’s insight that a thing “is all that it does,” an innovation that makes Images doubly useful for honouring animal subjectivity.[28] Coincidentally, or perhaps not, several of Pound’s own Images capture the distinctive motions of cats: “The footsteps of the cat upon the snow: / (are like) plum-blossoms”; “Black cat on the quince branch / mousing blossoms”’;  sexual attraction (is like) “purring” antennae.[29] While not exactly an Imagist poem, Yeats’ 1919 tribute to Maude Gonne’s beloved cat, Minnaloushe, presents an Image clustering the cat’s eyes with the moon, both of them waxing and waning.[30] In this way, it embodies a creaturely consciousness. The speaker also respectfully acknowledges the cat’s subjectivity and difference, wondering whether he sees himself as the human poet sees him.[31] We see a similar combination of creaturely Image and deference to cognitive difference in Denise Levertov’s “The Cat as Cat”:   “The cat on my bosom / sleeping and purring / fur-petalled chrysanthemum” is “a metaphor only if I / force him to be one”  / looking too long in his pale, pond, / dilating, /contracting eyes / that reject mirrors . . . .”[32] Invoking Martine Buber, Levertov characterizes the cat/human relationship not as the hierarchical “I-it” but the reciprocal “I-Thou.”[33]

“The Death of a Cat” 

I’ll close with the poem that, of all the ones I’ve read since losing Lucy, has best captured what her loss means to me: Louis MacNeice’s “The Death of a Cat” (1952).[34] 

Composed in memory of a beloved pet cat fatally injured on the streets of Athens, and addressed to a spouse who had loved this creature too, the poem acknowledges the emptiness his death has left in their home: “Since then, those months ago, these rooms miss something” (MacNeice, “>Death of a Cat,” in Collected Poems, 360-364; 360). The speaker mourns his pet, but with double-consciousness. Anticipating objections that his grief is “out of proportion,” he lays out his rebuttal. “To begin with,” he says, the cat “was a beautiful object,” an assertion he corroborates with a catalogue of physical details (his “[b]lue crisp fur,” his “paws of white velvet, his “Pharoah’s profile”) and an “Image” of his eyes (“Light in a rock crystal, / light distilled”) (p. 361). He lists the cat’s distinctive movements—“his gags, his mudras, his entrechats. / His triple bends and his double takes” (361). Both the double-consciousness and the substitution of particulars for the label “cat” are in keeping with strategies in Victorian pet elegies,[35]  but they also reflect a more nuanced modernist challenge to abstract ratiocination.   Continuing the argument, the speaker entertains a series of labels his imagined critics might apply to the cat in denying his grievability: claims that he was just an “object,” a “cipher,” an “automaton,” a “parasite”; “not a person,” “not volitive,” “not self-conscious,” “not useful” (p. 361). With each retort, he asserts that the cat was, in fact, a vital subject, a feeling agent, and a being of value, worthy of grief. He reinforces this case with a vivid imaginative reconstruction of what the cat must have seen and felt in his final days and hours on the streets, a “barrage” of sense-impressions and analogies.  In “cat-Athens” lacking words for things, the cat would have known “[s]mells and sounds . . . too many things unknown / On too many too quick senses” (362). All the things “drab and daily” to the humans who walked those streets would have been to him “deadly, all the blunt things sharp.” He’d have dodged “huge black chessmen” and “seven-league battery boots.” His whiskers would have buzzed before “[c]anyons of angry sound.” In the end, the sudden strike of a wheel had “ravelled out his being”(p. 362) yet he, “by some obstinate instinct,” had found his way home to die. He was found, near-dead, near the house, “[h]is purpose gone, only his pain remaining / Which, even if purpose is too human a word, / Was not too human a pain for a dying cat” (p. 363).  Having so movingly evoked the cat’s sensory and receptive experience and creaturely vulnerability, the speaker forestalls any further criticisms that the grief he feels for him is mere anthropomorphism.  

The speaker concludes his argument with a shift to an ambiguous addressee (his partner? the cat?) and an intriguing reference to Walter Pater’s conclusion to The Renaissance:

Yet more than an object? Why, most certainly.

You and I, darling, know that sonatas

Are more than sound and that green grass

Is more than grass or green, which is why

Each of our moments as they pass

Is of some moment:  more than object. 

So this is an epitaph, not for calamitous

Loss but for loss; this was a person

In a small way who had touched our lives

With a whisk of delight, like a snatch of a tune

From which one whole day’s mood derives.

For you and me, darling, this is an epitaph.[36]  (p. 364)

In the conclusion—a touchstone for modernist writers objecting to abstract reasoning—Pater defined “success in life” as experiencing the “continual vanishing away” of life—the fleeting “impressions” that “analysis . . . leaves off”—in all its fullness. The purpose of art, he said, is to give “nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass” (Pater, Renaissance, 196, 199). MacNeice’s speaker, reaching beyond labels for cherished things (“sonata,” “green grass,” “cat”) to the qualities that exceed them, follows Pater’s advice.   

The speaker’s closing words retain the defensiveness of a disenfranchised mourner, but also a certain defiance. The cat had been “a person,” who had touched his and his spouse’s life “in a small way,” but in the way Pater’s “impressions” are small: he’d been a “whisk of delight,” like the “snatch of a tune” or the fleeting green of the grass in summer. Here the speaker contemplates the cat’s dual identity as “subject” and “object|” as Hardy had done with Snowdove, but in a way both more precise and more consolatory.  In death, the cat has become one of those fleeting “impressions,” the experience of which, although and because they are fleeting, make life worthwhile.  But he also lived his life as a model “impressionist,” experiencing each “moment” without reductive labels.  Depicting the cat as both impression and impressionist, cherished memory and exemplary creaturely subject, is where the speaker rests his case for his value and grievability. It is the poem’s elegiac consolation, and, when I reflect on what it is to lose a beloved cat, a worthy epitaph. 

Notes