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Memorializing animals during the romantic period

Professor Chase Pielak brilliantly analyses early nineteenth Century British poetry by John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lord Byron and William Wordsworth, considering the imagery of both dead and deadly animals. The book is interspersed with lines of poetry from these authors’ works, followed by his interpretation of their meaning. He argues that the proximity to cemeteries and animals in this time period parallel anxieties towards death. With an interest in decay during the latter part of the eighteenth Century, the graveyard became a focus of poetry. In this writing, taken from a literary/cultural approach, exemplary literary texts were selected for their use of animals, interaction with animal/human ends, and the significance to Romanticism. Pielak uses the word ‘beasts’ for creatures that appear in moments of conflict ‘between the possibility of knowing and order and the state of the disease in which they appear.’ He notes that Romantic writers encounter the problem of animals as images being always more than and less than what we might hope and then begin to work out a system of confrontation that shapes our interactions with problematic creatures, including ourselves. The author argues that real animals participate in the human boundary project ‘through their physical and metaphoric relationships to cemeteries’ which helps us to read human and human/ animal social relations. For example, he observes that John Clare’s use of animal imagery induces him to imagine himself behind the face of an animal that nevertheless peers back. Wordsworth’s poetry is steeped in the significance attached to certain memorialised animal encounters. Wordsworth’s poem ‘Tribute: To the Memory of the Same Dog’ announces itself as a tribute, yet it is tribute paid to the memory of the dog, not to the dog itself. Such is an attempt to move the perceptual experience of the dog somehow into memory. Another Wordsworth poem ‘Animal Tranquilly and Decay’ at first read seems to elegise a decaying old man, yet on closer inspection eulogises decaying humanity, robbing the possibility of animal tranquilly from humanity that it suggests in the face of decay. By the turn of the nineteenth Century, animals had begun to show up in grave contexts, with concern over the health hazards of urban burials. Whether or not animals possessed a soul found disagreement amongst these British writers. In discussing epitaphs, Pielak suggests that animal bodies are living epitaphs inscribed metaphorically with the presence of another to be called to mind. Epitaphs are inscriptions on surfaces that attempt to memorialise. Pielak does an admirable job of relating the six poets’ writings to certain aspects of his arguments. Though a sociologist myself, and not heavily engaged with nineteenth Century British poetry, Pielak presents a commendable treatise on the importance of images of ‘dead and dying Romantic beasts’ and a memorialisation of animals during this time period. The book is an excellent read for anyone with interests in nineteenth Century British poetry or a desire to learn about animal memorialisation.