Poetry and Representation of Animals | 417 In the poetry of childhood, nursery rhymes and instructive books of childhood verse, one encounters poems which wean children away from a world view in sympathy with animals to the controlled and distanced relationship the adult world maintains In his preface to Technicians of the Sacred, Jerome Rothenberg notes that, of the primitive poetries from around the world which he has collected, “ above all there’s a sense-of-unity that surrounds the poem, a reality concept that acts as a cement, a unification of perspective” (Rothenberg, 1968, p xxii) In their poetry, Native Americans spoke in the voice of the deer spirit, as well as their own, the hunter’s John Bierhorst’s In the Trail of the Wind includes a whole section of poems “The Deer” from the Papago, Pima, and Chippewa The poems construct a sort of conversation between animal and man grounded in respect, belief, and connection (Bierhorst, 1971, pp 51–57) It is in their understanding of the connectedness of all living things, even the hunter and the prey, that their relationship to the animal kingdom is expressed Japanese haiku poets Basho, Issa, and Shiki, from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries respectively, address animals (frogs, crickets, cicadas, and others) In some poems they speak in the voices of animals, and throughout their work they show a consistent, tangible awareness of animal presence In his introduction to The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, Geoffrey Bownas notes that among Basho’s construct of rules for haiku, the poet “should so express the nature of the particular as to define, through it, the nature of the world.” (Bownas, 1964, p lxvi) While Issa’s poems directly address a cricket, a lanky frog, and insects, with a question or a warning, Basho’s in many instances use a creature’s sound or presence on which to hang a mood, a comment, an instant In Shiki’s poems, the slightness, to American sensibilities, of the haiku form seems to turn toward the poetic equivalent of a snapshot In all of these poets, the presence of and connectedness to the animal kingdom is unmistakable Incantatory and magnificent, William Blake’s “Tiger, tiger burning bright” (“The Tyger”) is poetry’s most startling creature, feverishly real, devastatingly powerful, and alive, addressed, in fact questioned, throughout the poem as to what “could frame thy fearful symmetry?” (Blake, 1958, pp 49–50) American poet Robinson Jeffers shows the same reverence and respect for the animal kingdom, for hawks, skunks, deer, stallions, and “the bird with the dark plumes in my blood” (Jeffers, 1959, p 196) The question of the extent to which visionary poets employ animals as symbols or metaphoric constructs lies outside this consideration For our purposes, the creatures are as vibrant and staggeringly real as they are meant to be The poetry of childhood is instructional, memorable and, at its best, able to capture the world from a child’s perspective Start with Mother Goose and her animal tortures Four and twenty black birds are baked in a pie Everywhere that Mary goes, so does the lamb The mouse runs up and down the clock, and finally three blind ones have their tails cut off with a carving knife by the farmer’s wife Luckily, thankfully, the poet James Stephens asks in his poem “Little Things” that the “Little creatures everywhere” forgive us all our trespasses (Bogan & Smith, 1965, p 19) Edward Lear’s Nonsense Books are filled with animals, some of them little