There are all sorts of ways of capturing animals and birds and fish. I spent most of my time, up to the age of fifteen or so, trying out many of these ways and when my enthusiasm began to wane, as it did gradually, I started to write poems.
You might not think that these two interests, capturing animals and writing poems, have much in common. But the more I think back the more sure I am that with me the two interests have been one interest. My pursuit of mice at threshing time when I was a boy, snatching them from under the sheaves as the sheaves were lifted away out of the stack and popping them into my pocket till I had thirty or forty crawling around in the lining of my coat, that and my present pursuit of poems seem to me to be different stages of the same fever. In a way, I suppose, I think of poems as a sort of animal. They have their own life, like animals, by which I mean that they seem quite separate from any person, even from their author, and nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them. And they have a certain wisdom. They know something special … something perhaps which we are very curious to learn. Maybe my concern has been to capture not animals particularly and not poems, but simply things which have a vivid life of their own outside mine.
(Poetry in the Making, 1967)
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The luminous spirit (maybe he is a crowd of spirits), that takes account of everything and gives everything its meaning, is missing, not missing, just incommunicado. But here and there, it may be, we hear it.
It is human of course, but it is also everything that lives. When we hear it, we understand what a strange creature is living in this Universe, and somewhere at the core of us – strange, beautiful, pathetic, terrible. Some animals and birds express this being pure and without effort, and then you hear the whole desolate, final reality in a voice, a tone.
(Orghast, 1971)
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Both Hawk and Pike (like the Bull) are motionless, or almost motionless. In a planned, straightforward way, I began them as a series in which they would be angels – hanging in the radiant glory around the creator’s throne, composed of terrific, holy power (there’s a line in ‘Hawk Roosting’ almost verbatim from Job), but either quite still, or moving only very slowly – at peace, and actually composed of the glowing substance of the law. Like Sons of God. Pike (luce = ‘fish of light’), Apis Bull and Horus. I wanted to focus my natural world – these familiars of my boyhood – in a ‘divine’ dimension. I wanted to express my sense of that. Again, these creatures are ‘at rest in the law’ – obedient, law-abiding, and are as I say the law in creaturely form. If the Hawk and the Pike kill, they kill within the law and their killing is a sacrament in this sense. It is an act not of violence but of law.
(Poetry and Violence, 1971)
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I was aware, as I went on writing, that above all I wanted to rid my language of the penumbra of abstractions that to my way of thinking cluttered the writing of all other poetry being written by post-Auden poets … So I squirmed and weaseled a way towards a language that would be wholly my own. Not my own by being exotic or eccentric in some way characteristic of me. But my own in that it would be an ABC of the simplest terms that I could feel rooted into my own life, my own feelings about quite definite things. So this conscious search for a ‘solid’ irrefutably defined basic (and therefore ‘limited’) kit of words drew me inevitably towards the solid irrefutably defined basic kit of my experiences – drew me towards animals, basically: my childhood and adolescent pantheon of wild creatures, which were saturated by first hand intense feeling that went back to my infancy. Those particular subjects, in a sense, were the models on which I fashioned my workable language.
(Letter to Anne-Lorraine Bijou, 1992)