The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry by Michael Malay

Author:Michael Malay
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The concept is imaginatively resonant: Weber’s cage symbolises, in a single image, something of the lived experience of modern capitalism—an ‘irresistible’ system that binds individuals to a particular mode of existence. By reading Rilke with reference to Weber, then, Morrow is suggesting that the creature in ‘The Panther’ offers a concrete image of this boundedness, as well as the sense of defeat it might inspire. Made ‘weary’ by its time in the zoo, the panther is crushed into submission—just as the individual, thrown into the ‘modern economic order’, is inexorably determined by the forces of capitalism.

Like Rilke’s poem, Hughes’s ‘The Jaguar’ describes a caged animal in a zoo; unlike Rilke’s panther, however, whose spirit has been ‘stunned’ by its existence, Hughes’s jaguar remains vitally alive—imprisoned by its cage but also fiercely indifferent to it:

  More than to the visionary his cell:

  His stride is wilderness of freedom:

  The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.

  Over the cage floor the horizons come. (CP 20)

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