To Rise To Walk Again
The Heaven of Animals
By James L. Dickey
Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.
Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.
To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.
For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,
More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey
May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk
Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain
At the cycle’s center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.
Copyright Credit: James Dickey, “The Heaven of Animals” from The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945-1992. Copyright © 1992 by James Dickey.
This is a magnificent poem. A friend handed it to me yesterday. “Heaven” is a term reserved for theological discussion, church if you will. The poet describes the relationships between living things around us as a description of a “heaven” that is apt for animals. Even without souls animals are majestic beings. Animals partake of the life of a wood or of a grassland, rising in landscapes also superlative in variety and color. Dickey’s language reminds me of the wildflowers in late July on the Fabyan Estate by the Fox river.
Not to romanticize this, the predators, mammals with eyes forward, built for the hunt, are exquisite at the practice of identifying and taking “prey.” As for the rabbit, or the field mouse, it embraces it’s lot and fulfills itself, a species destiny.
It is a cycle, this “heaven” that Dickey describes. “They fall, they are torn, They rise, they walk again.”
One way or another, shouldn’t that be enough?
Here James Dickey reads his poem CLICK HERE
2 thoughts on “To Rise To Walk Again”
As usual I’m about to throw a small amount of cold water on just about anything that passes before my eyes including today’s offering. Mr. Dickey has given the creatures of the forest and glen a consciousness that, at least to me, does not exist in nature aside from the human species. A gazelle that is attacked by a lioness does its best to escape being a meal. It feels the pain of dismemberment as would any mammal. It does not give itself freely to the ethos of the circle of life and death. I know I’m probably being overly literal in my point of view, but that what makes me so unromantic in this assessment of Mr. Dickey’s poem.
Again, just my take, but it seems that we all want to survive and to live life as best we can be it a human, a chipmunk, a gazelle, or a porcupine. No animal will give itself to death freely unless it is to sacrifice itself for the possible safety of others. Anyway, another two cents from the peanut gallery.
I think that Dickey would be in full agreement with you. In my opinion this is anything but a romantic take on the life of mammals, predator and prey. Until the moment arrives in awareness of a squirrel or rabbet that it is about to be a meal, there is no fantasizing about continuation of a soul in a life after life. There is just life, life such as it is for a herbivore. I do not detect any attempt to cast a unrealistic patina upon the sharp edged boundary between life and death in this poem. Animals, unlike we homo sapiens fulfill themselves without pain. They are of a piece with the wood and the plain living fully their role in the cyclic nature of things.
Are we not all ensconced in the peanut gallery?