How Shall My Animal - Analysis

The inner beast as a mind-made body

The poem’s central drama is a speaker trying to imagine, summon, and finally mourn an inner animal that feels at once like instinct, sexuality, and creative force. From the start, this creature is not encountered in a field but in the cavernous skull, a place where it exists as a traced wizard shape rather than a clean anatomical fact. That phrase makes the beast feel like a spell the mind casts on itself: something half-imagined, half-real, powerful precisely because it resists clear definition. Yet the skull is also a Vessel of abscesses, so the animal is born into a body that is already diseased, already decaying, and still capable of exultation. The poem keeps those two truths fused: the animal is ecstasy and infection in the same container.

The repeated question How shall is not polite wondering; it is panic disguised as inquiry. The speaker is asking how anything so alive can survive the conditions of being human: a face with a shrouding veil, a mind that turns experience into spelling, and a body that must be buried.

Burial under the spelling wall

The first stanza pits the animal’s rightful behavior against the forces that cover and name it. The creature should be furious, drunk as a vineyard snail, flailed like an octopus: images of messy, wet, exaggerated life, all muscle and appetite. But instead of being allowed to quarrel / With the outside weathers, it faces burial under the spelling wall. That phrase is crucial: burial is not only dirt and coffin; it is also language, the wall of words that can seal up what you feel by turning it into something sayable. The invoked veil suggests that even this shrouding is partly self-caused: the speaker calls down the covering even while protesting it.

There is also a cosmic shrinking here. The animal wants to engage the discovered skies, but those skies are Drawn down to its weird eyes. What should be outward and immense collapses into private perception. The tension is sharp: the beast is made for weather and sky, yet it is trapped inside a face, inside a skull, inside a vocabulary that can bury what it names.

Magnetism, mating, and the violent sweetness of daylight

The second stanza tries a different solution: instead of asking how the beast endures burial, the speaker asks how it might be pulled outward, how it might magnetize toward a mate and a world of action. The attraction is intensely physical and mythic at once: the studded male appears in a bent, midnight blaze, a kind of erotic night-fire. The body becomes a landscape of emblems: lionhead’s heel, horseshoe of the heart. These are not tender images; they are hard, hoofed, feral. Even love arrives armored.

Then the poem flares into a fantasy of ordinary animal thriving: trot with a loud mate through haybeds, Love and labour and kill in quick, sweet, cruel light. The line refuses to separate pastoral life from predation. If the beast is truly alive, it will not only love; it will also kill. And the daylight that enables life is also the light that exposes cruelty. Still, the speaker imagines this ferocity as generative: till the locked ground sprout, till the black, burst sea rejoice. Even the body’s interior joins in, grotesquely: bowels turn turtle, veins become a Claw squeezing out The parched and raging voice. The poem insists that voice is not an airy, spiritual thing; it is wrung from red particles, from pressure and thirst.

Fishermen of mermen: art as a dangerous kind of capture

The third stanza shifts into a scene of fishing, but not for ordinary fish: Fishermen of mermen creep on the tide with charmed pins and bridebait of gold bread. This is courtship turned trap, myth turned industry. Against them, the speaker offers his own method: I with a living skein, with Tongue and ear in the thread. That is an arresting definition of making: the artist as someone who listens and speaks simultaneously, spinning a thread out of perception and utterance. He tries to angle the temple-bound cavepools of spells and bone, to fish inside the skull’s sacred, trapped waters.

But the thing he draws out is not a clean prize. It is a tentacle, Nailed with an open eye, rising from a bowl of wounds and weed. The image suggests that whatever the speaker pulls from his depths is both seeing and injured, both alive and pinned. Art here becomes a paradoxical act: you bring the animal into visibility by wounding it, you give it an eye by nailing it. The speaker wants to clasp my fury on ground and clap its great blood down, as if the only way to make the beast real is to force it into the heavy world. And yet the stanza ends with a refusal: Never shall beast be born to atlas the few seas or poise the day on a horn. The grand mythic task is impossible. The inner animal cannot become a stable cosmic bearer; it cannot hold the day up like a unicorn’s horn. The contradiction is devastating: the speaker can trace, magnetize, angle, and nail—but not truly incarnate the beast into a lasting power.

Scissors in frost: the turn toward mutilation and final rest

The last stanza is the poem’s hard turn from summoning to cutting. The language becomes clipped and cold: Sigh long, clay cold, lie shorn. Where earlier images were wet (snail, octopus, tide), now everything is frost and stone: gilled stone, sly scissors ground in frost. Those scissors Clack through the thicket of strength—strength imagined as something organic and tangled that can be trimmed down. Even love is no longer an abundance; it is love hewn in pillars, shaped like a monument rather than lived like an appetite. The mouth becomes a wrecked coastline: wrackspiked maiden mouth, and the eye’s wild speech is lopped and clipped: Clips short the gesture of breath. Breath itself becomes a gesture that can be cut off.

What dies is vividly bodily: Die in red feathers when the flying heaven’s cut. The heaven that earlier might have been discovered skies is now something you can cut, as if the world’s openness can be mutilated into closure. The speaker addresses the animal directly at the end—rest robbed, my beast—with a tenderness that is also accusation. This beast has kicked from a dark den, leaped up the whinnying light, and yet it has dug your grave in my breast. The final line makes the poem’s bleakest claim: the animal’s most vigorous motions—kicking, leaping—have been inseparable from self-burial. The grave is not out in the world; it is inside the speaker.

A harsh question the poem won’t let go of

If the animal is the source of the speaker’s parched and raging voice, what does it mean that it must be nailed to be seen and must dig its grave to exist at all? The poem seems to suggest that the very acts that make intensity legible—spelling it, shaping it, invoking it—are also the acts that shroud and bury it. The speaker’s sorrow is not just that the beast dies, but that it can only live in a body and a language that are already cutting it down.