Buffalo Country - Analysis

A landscape that feels alive, and slightly hostile

Paterson’s central move in Buffalo Country is to make the place itself feel like a living creature: heavy, watchful, and faintly poisonous. The buffalo is the poem’s named subject, but the real protagonist is the tropical North as an atmosphere of slow danger. From the opening, the waterways are grey, sullen, and deep and slow, and even motion seems ominous: alligators don’t simply swim, they slide and drift like a floating death. The tone is fascinated, but that fascination is steeped in dread, as if the speaker can’t admire the scene without also warning you away from it.

The repeated insistence There is the buffalo anchors this mood. The animal becomes a kind of proof that the country is truly wild: not a picturesque wilderness, but a place where heat, mud, and predation are basic facts of life.

Water, mud, fever: the country as a slow sickness

The first two stanzas trap the buffalo in a thick, wet world. We see big lagoons with Regia lilies, but the beauty is quickly stained by sound and superstition: the Nankin heron croons an ill-omened note. The buffalo is not heroic or majestic here; it is almost half-submerged, buried to nose and throat, in the ooze and the mud. That detail makes the animal seem ancient and amphibious, part of the swamp rather than an intruder in it.

Then Paterson adds the human body’s vulnerability: the fever comes on the south wind’s breath. Fever is an invisible predator, carried like scent, and it puts the reader in the position of a visitor who can be harmed simply by being present. The country’s menace isn’t only teeth and claws; it’s climate, illness, and exhaustion.

The jungle as a haunted hiding place

A shift happens when the buffalo is described as actively avoiding people: From the hunter’s gun he hides. The poem briefly becomes a pursuit narrative, but the jungle immediately overwhelms that storyline. The place is dark and damp, populated by a slinking dingo and flying foxes that camp overhead, turning the canopy into a ceiling of restless life.

Paterson’s most revealing image here is moral rather than zoological: the bats hang like myriad fiends in line. That comparison doesn’t merely decorate the scene; it tells you how the speaker is interpreting it. The jungle is not just unfamiliar, it is coded as infernal, a place where even ordinary animals seem like demons. The sun itself is diminished into a sluggish lamp, as if daylight can’t fully civilize or clarify what’s going on under the creepers that twist and twine.

From swamp to plains: a lull that doesn’t relax the poem

When the poem moves to rolling plains and coarse cane grasses, the tone softens into a noontime trance: the noontide’s drowsy spell. The buffalo now grazes rather than wallows; the scene seems more open and breathable. Yet Paterson keeps the posture of watchfulness. The jabiru still stands like a sentinel, and the brolgas dance in a way that reads less like celebration than ritual. Even in the brighter country, something is always on guard, always marking territory.

This is one of the poem’s key contradictions: it offers a sensual catalogue of wildlife and plant life, but it cannot stop translating that abundance into threat, omen, and surveillance. The “drowsy” moment is a lull, not a peace.

The poem’s “wild” includes people, but only at a distance

In the final stanza, Paterson broadens the claim: All that the world can know / Of the wild and the weird is here. That line turns the landscape into a kind of museum of strangeness, a place meant to stand for extremity itself. Human presence appears, but it is presented as part of the scenery: Where the black men come and go / With their boomerang and spear. The phrasing makes them another element of “the wild,” folded into the same catalogue as wild ducks and reed beds. It’s a distancing gesture: people are recognized, but not individualized, and their tools are made into signs of primitiveness rather than evidence of a lived, complex society.

The closing image—wild duck darken the evening sky as tropic night approaches—finishes the poem the way it began: with movement that feels like a threat. Darkness arrives not as calm, but as a massing, a blotting-out.

What is the buffalo really doing in this poem?

The buffalo itself remains strangely passive: it wallows, hides, grazes. Yet everything around it is described in a language of death, fiends, illness, and omen. That imbalance suggests the buffalo is less a character than a pretext, a solid animal used to justify a vision of country as fundamentally menacing and unknowable. The poem invites wonder, but it also rehearses fear—fear of heat, of swamp, of sickness, of night, of anything that refuses to become familiar.