[In the following essay, Pite argues that British Romantic writers, far from being concerned only with solitary experiences, were social writers whose affinity for nature established links between humanity and the environment.]

It is hard to give a single, satisfactory definition of Romanticism and equally difficult to say what unites all the different accounts of ecology. Viewed as a science, ecology is a recognized and established discipline; as a politics or a system of values, it is highly contested. Environmentalists, conservationists, ecologists, and green activists all differ, often passionately, about what should be done and why it should be done—about how people should treat the world they live in and how they should conceive of their place within it. Similarly, literary critics argue about what defines Romantic poetry—its sublimity, its simplicity, the high value it places on imagination, or its mode of engagement with political, often revolutionary events. However, because Romanticism and ecology can both be understood in several ways, very different points of contact may be found between them.

To give some examples, Jonathan Bate has aligned John Clare to ideas of ‘dwelling’, drawn from Heidegger, that deep ecologists find congenial. However, he has also placed Wordsworth within an ‘environmental tradition’ and as a forerunner of modern conservation. In Romantic Ecology, Bate links Wordsworth's writing about the Lake District to the establishment in the same area of, first, the National Trust and, later, a national park.¹ Ecology, however, is not the same as conservationism and in fact some environmentalists oppose the establishment of national parks.² Analogously, Wordsworth's and Clare's work are not the only possible paradigms for Romantic poetry. Accordingly, in this essay, I will propose that a further tradition of ‘Romantic ecology’ can be found in texts from that period, one that suggests, simultaneously, a different account of how people can best inhabit the natural world and a new slant on Romanticism itself.³

Although twentieth‐century criticism has encouraged us to locate the Romantic in texts which are direct rather than rhetorically complex, serious more than playful, and concerned with intense, solitary experiences instead of easygoing, social or urbane ones, this is not the whole story. Romantic poets were frequently playful, social writers who used consciously artificial forms. I suggest here that it is when they are writing in these seemingly ‘non‐Romantic’ modes that they are most profoundly ecological.⁴ In what follows, I sketch a tradition which runs from late eighteenth‐century writers through to the ‘major’ Romantic poets—a tradition in which affection is seen as the way to establish links between humanity and natural objects. This affection for nature (rather than identification with or absorption in it) runs counter to the Romantic sublime and constitutes another Romantic ecology—another and, I think, a better representation, contained in Romantic period writing, of how we may conduct our relations with the non‐human environment.

William Cowper (1731‐1800) wrote several poems concerned with the felling of trees: ‘The Poplar‐Field’ (1784), for instance, or ‘Yardley Oak’ (1791). It has been pointed out that these poems have political meaning, both protesting against profligate exploitation of natural resources and recommending the thrift of an earlier, non‐commercial society.⁵ Arguably, these are ecological points. However, ‘Yardley Oak’ typifies Cowper's work less in its explicit politics than in the arch quaintness of its style. Addressing the tree, he says:

          Thou wast a bauble once: a cup and ball,
Which babes might play with; and the thievish jay
Seeking her food, with ease might have purloin'd
The auburn nut that held thee, swallowing down
Thy yet close‐folded latitude of boughs
And all thine embryo vastness, at a gulp.
But Fate thy growth decreed.(6)

(17‐23)

Cowper had translated Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into blank verse. Employing the same form here, he adopts the heroic style, fully alert to the potential mismatch between grand manner and homely subject—an old, rotten oak tree. ‘But Fate thy growth decreed’ sounds ludicrously over the top for an acorn, ‘a bauble’.

A few lines later, Cowper repeats the effect, addressing the acorn itself:

          Thou fell'st mature, and in the loamy clod
Swelling, with vegetative force instinct
Didst burst thine egg, as theirs the fabled Twins
Now stars; two lobes, protruding, pair'd exact;
A leaf succeeded, and another leaf,
And all the elements thy puny growth
Fost'ring propitious, thou becam'st a twig.(7)

(33‐9)

The let‐down of the final line produces a joke full of charm. Becoming a twig seems a ridiculously small accomplishment, given the build‐up Cowper provides, yet it is not belittled. Instead, the energy and meticulous wonder of the lines brings out the effort involved in getting so far and admires the plant's achievement. These mock‐epic effects create a peculiar and mobile relation between the oak tree and the poet; dwarfed and overawed by the tree, the poet is also affectionate towards it, praising it as you might congratulate a child by saying, ‘My, how you've grown!’⁸

A corollary to this mixture of awe and condescension appears in Cowper's treatment of the oak's mythical powers: at the beginning he admits that, were he not a Christian—were his mind not ‘imbued / with truth from heaven’—he might ‘with rev'rence kneel and worship’ the tree (6‐8). Cowper can understand adoration of the tree; he can even yearn after an attitude towards nature which Christian revelation has proved wrong and outlawed. A few lines later, he wishes the tree could speak ‘As in Dodona once thy kindred trees / Oracular’ (41‐2), but only near the end of the piece is this desire answered and then in an unexpected way:

          But since, although well qualified by age
To teach, no spirit dwells in thee, nor voice
May be expected from thee, seated here
On thy distorted root, with hearers none
Or prompter, save the scene, I will perform
Myself the oracle, and will discourse,
In my own ear such matter as I may.(9)

(137‐43)

Cowper will be his own oracle which seems to dismiss the tree as dead wood, a spiritless object that leaves him dependent on his own resources. It is, in some ways, a disappointing swerve into the prosaic though one informed by a lasting sense of incongruity. The mock‐epic which deflates the tree's growth, keeping its splendour in proportion, has a similar effect on Cowper's persona, who is seen as slightly absurd—perched on a root and talking to himself. Modesty disguises but does little to moderate the sturdy self‐reliance that Cowper claims here. Pagan devotion to trees and a hunger for natural wisdom are replaced by an assertion that humanity alone possesses the capacity to speak the truths which natural objects illustrate.

To some, Cowper's Christian humanism will seem plainly non‐ or even anti‐ecological. The dualism of man and nature which Cowper's poem finally reaffirms has been blamed for Western civilization's environmental destructiveness. Furthermore, his synthesizing of classical myths and Christian doctrine, although light‐hearted, corresponds to the philosophical tradition of this dualistic thinking.¹⁰ Even if this critique is accepted, however, the ecological alternative need not be a rejection of dualism or an attempt to overcome it—in fact, it may be that neither of these is (humanly) possible.

Cowper's impulse remains to seek a kind of kinship with the natural object from which he has radically differentiated himself. Following the lines above, he at once addresses the oak:

Thou, like myself, hast stage by stage attain'd
Life's wintry bourn; thou, after many years,
I after few; but few or many prove
A span in retrospect.

(144‐7)

In mock‐epic, artifice is part of the charm. The writing advertises its own procedures, inviting the reader to enjoy a successful performance and to admire the ingenuity with which epic devices are applied in novel, unexpected situations. So what happens is that the artistic performance matches the moment when the object of praise attains its goal—when the acorn becomes a twig. The ability to achieve connects artist and subject, poet and tree, allowing a kinship to emerge and a kind of equality.

The object praised by the mock‐epic poem differs fundamentally from the speaker in lacking a voice of its own. The speaker, however, goes to great lengths to find ways of suggesting how this silenced, appropriated thing is distinctively itself. The reader is surprised into noticing that once upon a time the tree became a twig. The surprise is made possible by the clash between epic register and trivial event; it is heightened by the swerve from fancifulness and playfulness to precise detail. It produces, in turn, a recognition that this different thing is ‘like myself’—not the same as myself, nor to be identified with me, but capable of being seen as like and of being liked. Affection bridges the gap which, nevertheless, is still seen as inevitably confirmed by the human‐centred language of poetry.¹¹

Cowper's poetry repeatedly focuses on these moments where the speaker grasps his separateness from natural objects and tries to re‐establish likeness though not sameness. In ‘Yardley Oak’ it is accomplished by his emphasizing that the words are his, addressed to and for a silent natural object. Elsewhere, this is often brought about by his offering the lesson of a particular story in an explicit ‘moral’ appended to a poem. Both of these techniques are used in ‘The Needless Alarm’ (written before 1791)—a poem in which Cowper gives speeches to several members of a flock of sheep, prefacing the conversation with an apology that is characteristically trenchant:

          The man to solitude accustom'd long
Perceives in ev'ry thing that lives a tongue;
Not animals alone …
He spells them true by intuition's light,
And needs no glossary to set him right.

(55‐7; 69‐70)

Cowper puts into words an argument between several sheep about whether or not it is advisable to jump into a pit full of thorns when they hear the rumpus made by the fox hunt going by. Luckily, good sense prevails and they do not jump; the hunt rides away into the distance and Cowper concludes:

MORAL

Beware of desp'rate steps. The darkest day
(Live till to‐morrow) will have pass'd away.(12)

(132‐3)

Cowper was subject to periods of suicidal depression connected to his belief that he was cut off from all hope of salvation. Writing poetry helped. It did not overcome his sense of separateness and isolation; these, according to Cowper's distorted Calvinism, were unavoidable and irrevocable. Yet, none the less, poetry enabled him to relieve loneliness by finding similarities in the nonhuman.

This affection for the similar appeared most touchingly perhaps when Cowper wrote about his pets. Pets, of course, do not square with everyone's sense of what is ecological. Enforced captivity is seen as cruel, domestication as exploitative. In addition, it is easy to accuse people of relating to their pets sentimentally, or anthropomorphically, ignoring the animals' instinctive behaviors, many of which can be cruel. Moreover, pet‐keeping appears to endorse a hierarchy which places people at the top and creatures (nature) below them.

Cowper himself kept hares, Puss, Tiney, and Bess: ‘Puss was tamed by gentle usage’; he wrote, ‘Tiney was not to be tamed at all; and Bess had a courage and confidence that made him tame from the beginning.’¹³ He was evidently attached to all three but perhaps to Tiney most of all, something which comes across in ‘Epitaph on a Hare’:

Old Tiney, surliest of his kind,
          Who, nurs'd with tender care,
And to domestic bounds confin'd,
          Was still a wild Jack‐hare.

(5‐8)

Cowper is oddly passive about the differing characters of the three hares—his letter describes their varying degrees of tameness with sensible clarity while the epitaph for Tiney does not narrate, as it might, Cowper's growing respect for this animal that resists his overtures. Instead, Tiney's surliness is presented simply as a given; it is respected while, at the same time, Cowper also admits his self‐interested motives for keeping the animals:

I kept him for his humour' sake,
          For he would oft beguile
My heart of thought that made it ache
          And force me to a smile.

(33‐6)

There is no doubt that Tiney is ‘kept’, ‘confin'd’, and there is no evidence of anxiety on Cowper's part about confining him. What emerges from the poem, however, is Cowper's strangely total acceptance of the animal as a being unto itself. His own reasons for keeping it and his poetic moralizing about it (which finds an emblem of transience in the animal's death), both enjoy the same independence from Tiney as Tiney enjoys from Cowper. Fondness and affection for the animal create both ‘tender care’ and a disciplined, almost distanced respect for it.

Though this is by no means the only model for an ecological relation to natural objects, it is, I believe, a distinctive and useful one because no environment in the United Kingdom is any longer more than semi‐wild at best. Nothing has been left alone. Like the hare, there may be wildness still in the nature around us but it is a wildness now confined. The environment can be seen to have the status of a pet even though treating it like a pet may seem wrong, inappropriate or dangerous. Cowper's unsentimental respect for his pet, his sense of its (and his) difference and equality is coupled with an intense affection for something that happens to want to remain outside his power. These forms of feeling can be transferred from the world of keeping pets to that of environmentalism.

Similar sentiments exist elsewhere in Romantic literature forming, I believe, an alternative tradition. In this tradition the self does not experience a sublime, self‐extinguishing identification with the forms of nature; instead, it seeks to establish with natural things a relation ‘founded on the affections,’ one of the categories Wordsworth used to classify his poems in collected editions. And it is notable, in this respect, that Wordsworth regarded ‘Poems founded on the Affections’ as equivalent to ‘Poems of the Imagination’, ‘Poems of the Fancy’, or ‘Poems of Sentiment and Reflection’. Each mode stood alongside the others, given equal prominence and value.

Among Wordsworth's ‘Poems Founded on the Affections’ is ‘The Redbreast (suggested in a Westmoreland Cottage)’. Here, Wordsworth notices the same paradox as Cowper referring to the bird as a ‘Thrice happy Creature!’

                                                            in all lands
Nurtured by hospitable hands:
Free entrance to this cot has he,
Entrance and exit both yet free …
He need not fear the season's rage,
For the whole house is Robin's cage.(14)

Cowper also wrote an ‘Epitaph on a Free but Tame Redbreast’ and both writers are drawn to creatures who are, in Cowper's phrase ‘neither rudely bold / Nor spiritlessly tame’ and whose tameness does not derive from submission (21‐2). Robins are attractive to this feeling because they are undomesticated and yet ‘friendly’—they will come close to humans and take food from the hand quite readily. Such cohabitation again seems a relation one could generalize into an environmental ideal, whereby from a position of dominance humans could practice a form of tender care that preserves animals' freedom and wildness. Wordsworth uses the word ‘friends’ and, like friendship, this relation depends upon mutual respect, upon the continuance of distinctions rather than their erasure.¹⁵

The danger of this consciously modest way of writing and thinking about humans and nature is its proximity to whimsy or fey idealizations. Robins are, in fact, highly aggressive territorially and impossible to keep in cages with other birds because they kill them. Friendship with such an animal seems as illusory as the creature's supposed tameness. As is clear from his epitaph on Tiney, Cowper is unworried, however, by his pet's comparable viciousness:

Though duly from my hand he took
          His pittance ev'ry night,
He did it with a jealous look,
          And, when he could, would bite.

(9‐12)

Respect countenances this behaviour and Cowper writes about it with a hint of the mock‐epic, suggesting as he did with the tree in ‘Yardley Oak’, a supple movement between attitudes of condescension and curiosity. Tiney seems as devious and watchful as a naughty child and, at the same time, as fascinating as a newly‐discovered species. Wordsworth's poem is, however, less strange and less successful. The robin housed in a cottage comes across as a pastoral spirit, seeming to make real the human dream of man and beast harmoniously coexisting. Yet, as ‘Yardley Oak’ shows, this drift towards the sentimental—towards petting the wild—need not take place. Romantic period writers remain able to appreciate and demonstrate the wildness of the tamed something which becomes particularly clear in their poems about cats.

Christopher Smart's ‘Jubilate Agno’ (‘Rejoice in the Lamb’) was written while he was in a mental asylum and remained unpublished in his lifetime. Smart probably wrote a line every day, rather as you would write a diary, finding every day a reason for praising God. He would include current events, especially when the British won a battle, the weather, other inmates and outlandish pseudo‐science. Famously, he also gave thanks to God for his pet cat:

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
[…]
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in compleat cat.
[…]
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadrupede.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the musick.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.(16)

The section ends at this point with that anticlimactic, ‘For he can creep’. The poem, though, moves constantly from the sublime to the apparently ridiculous. Smart says that his cat ‘is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him’ while also discovering and delighting in Jeoffry's skills, his agility, his ‘compleat cat’.

Smart's writing shares with Cowper's an ability to move between several positions in relation to the animal, seeing it in heroic terms and carefully observing its everyday life. Cowper's writing wittily undercuts his superiority and command, implying an equality that human words cannot articulate. Smart's work extravagantly dislocates conventional forms of description, employing sudden shifts in register and diction to convey the animal's uniqueness and separateness. Both writers' originality lies in their adaptation of received forms (literary and classical in Cowper, biblical in Smart); in both, artistic innovation is designed to express an affection which is limitless and unlimiting.

Keats wrote about cats with a similar mixture of respect, amusement, and affection:

‘TO MRS REYNOLDS'S CAT’

Cat! who hast passed thy grand climacteric,
          How many mice and rats hast in thy days
          Destroyed? How many tit‐bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears—but prithee do not stick
          Thy latent talons in me.(17)

Keats creates play between the grandiose ‘Destroyed’, coming after a dramatic enjambment, and the rather low‐grade, ‘mice and rats’—a mock‐epic effect similar to Cowper's and, like his, emphasizing the difference in scale between man and animal. Initially, ‘Destroyed’ sounds inappropriate, even laughable, but it is recognized and suggested that to the cat this verb is the right one. Similarly, describing the cat's eyes as ‘those bright languid segments green’ makes for a startling, distancing oddness—they are oxymoronic in being both ‘bright’ and ‘languid’, yet they are definitely there, the ‘segments’ as indisputable as geometric shapes. As in Cowper, an amused interest, energized by the object's curiosity value, can release a sense of the animal's strangeness. Delight which could turn into condescension produces instead respect.

Keats notices too the cat's ‘latent talons’ which corresponds to Cowper's use of ‘embryo vastness’ to describe how a full‐grown oak is present potentially within an acorn; For Keats's ‘latent talons’ similarly implies there is more to the cat than meets the eye, that it may scratch and that the claws being ‘talons’ may strike deep. The writer signals a wariness which proves well founded even though it may sound arch. In his poem ‘The Kitten and the Falling Leaves’, Wordsworth makes a similar observation, noticing how a kitten's eagerness to catch leaves brings out the hunter in him: ‘But the Kitten, how she starts, / Crouches, stretches, paws, and darts! … With a tiger‐leap half‐way / Now she meets the coming prey.’¹⁸

Christopher Smart makes the same claim abruptly and engagingly:

For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.(19)

In saying that Jeoffry ‘is of the tribe of Tiger,’ Smart means something obvious: a cat is visibly related to a tiger; the domestic animal, a scaled‐down version of something larger. Furthermore this earthly relation extends into the heavenly realm: ‘For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.’ A kind of magnificence suddenly surrounds the humble pet. Jeoffry is no longer just a miniature tiger; in his essential and true being, like all cats, he partakes of the tigerish.

This visionary claim is disconcertingly surrounded by Smart's meticulous descriptions of Jeoffry's behaviour, ‘brisking about the life.’ Particulars and universals seem mutually dependent here in ways that recall Romantic accounts of the symbol. Both particular detail and universal significance are discovered through Smart's intensity of affection for this creature. Other, more famous writers, worked in a similar way: Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne extends into the wildlife of his local district the feelings which Smart has for his pet cat. His unprecedentedly detailed observation produced scientific knowledge—White was the first to record the harvest‐mouse as a distinct species—and generates the affectionate regard it should depend upon.²⁰ William Blake's Songs of Experience, likewise, put into the public realm what Smart's unpublished writings had privately affirmed in setting up a contrast between the visionary challenge posed by ‘The Tiger’ and the unthreatening fragility of ‘The Fly’.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? …
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered Heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?(21)

Les Murray has a cat declare, ‘I permit myself to be / neither ignored nor understood’ and Blake's tiger is the same.²² His questions about it repeatedly inquire whether we can square this creature with the benevolence we usually ascribe to its creator, God. The poem questions the reader relentlessly and yet concludes where it began—only more so. Both these aspects push back interpretation. The reader is encouraged to recognize the limits of human understanding and then go beyond them in order to reach a point of imaginative insight. The poem forcefully urges its readers to see that earth's tigers are terms of ‘the Angel Tiger’ (who may be an avenging angel).

A few poems later, however, Blake shifts register completely:

Little fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

(1‐8)

Like many of the poems discussed here, Blake's teeters on the brink of whimsy. Its deliberate naivety may sound quaint, contrived, or banal. ‘Thou, like myself,’ Cowper said to Yardley Oak; Blake looks at a mere fly in the same light. Less affectionate than Smart, less witty than Cowper, Blake's work is none the less continuous with them in its drive towards a sense that natural things are separate from the human, yet remain equal to us and worthy of respect.

One of the projects of ecocriticism is to discover in texts from other periods, the feelings and ethics that may help us construe our relations with nature today. These poems, I would argue, are helpful in achieving that end in several ways. They contain an approach to the natural world which corresponds exactly to neither conservationist ideas nor those of ‘deep ecology’. Instead, equality overcomes the hierarchy which places humankind above nature; while, at the same time, respect acknowledges the separation between a speaking humanity and the natural objects that do not reply or participate in the (human) conversation. The coexistence of difference and equality then recognizes the limited and yet, to us, authoritative way in which we perceive the world. Furthermore, it correlates with a mode of acting in the world. People differ from other animals and living things not only in their superior brains and linguistic skills but in being almost invulnerably dominant. However much people seek to re‐enter nature or identify themselves with natural things, they do so from a position of power. Acknowledging how language and self‐consciousness distances us from the natural, these poets offer an analogue for acknowledging this distance created by dominance. Nevertheless, seeing equality within and despite that distance, the poems suggest the respect and regard for natural things which will lead us consciously and deliberately to leave them be or to provide ‘tender care’: cherishing other living beings as only we have the power to do; doing so in order to release in every creature its inhuman ‘compleatness’.

By virtue of their distinctive position and set of feelings, these poems cannot simply be equated with modern‐day thinking. As a result, reading them may prompt us to reconsider positions we have taken for granted—to reassess our conservation practices and reconsider our desire for an identification with nature. Interestingly, too, lending them greater prominence challenges conventional accounts of the Romantic movement. These poems and their writers give us the opportunity to choose a new Romanticism as well as a different ‘Romantic ecology’.

Notes

1. Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 49: ‘All who walk in the National Parks are legatees of Wordsworth.’ See also his, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000).

2. See James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, ‘The Nature Lords’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 May 2000, pp. 3‐4. I discuss these issues more fully in ‘How Green were the Romantics?’, Studies in Romanticism 35: 3 (1996), pp. 357‐73.

3. By comparison with, say, feminist or post‐colonial criticism, ecocriticism has so far I think altered the canon relatively little.

4. I use ‘ecological’ here not so much in its scientific sense as in its ethical or political one; that is, I take writing to be ecological when it addresses (either explicitly or implicitly) questions about human conduct in relation to the environment.

5. See Tim Fulford's valuable article, ‘Cowper, Wordsworth, Clare: The Politics of Trees’, John Clare Society Journal, 14 (1995), pp. 47‐59.

6. All references to Cowper's poems taken from, Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, 4th edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).

7. The ‘fabled Twins’ are Castor and Pollux, sons of Jupiter, who hatched out of an egg laid by their (human) mother, Leda.

8. Something similar happens in many of Cowper's poems; see for instance, ‘To the Immortal Memory of the Halibut On which I Dined this Day’, Poetical Works, pp. 359‐60.

9. At Dodona in ancient Greece, oracles were delivered by a grove of oak trees.

10. See Lynn White Jr, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’, Science, 155, 3767 (1967), pp. 1,203‐7 and John Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth, 1980).

11. Arne Naess takes the opposing view that ‘identification’ with nature leads to a true regard for it. See his Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, trans. David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 172‐4.

12. See also, among others, ‘The Retired Cat’, ‘Pairing Time Anticipated: A Fable’, and ‘The Pine‐Apple and the Bee’, Poetical Works, pp. 297, 379, 407‐9.

13. William Cowper, in a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine, June 1784. See The Letters and Prose Writings, eds James King and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), vol. 5, p. 40.

14. William Wordsworth, ‘The Redbreast (Suggested in a Westmoreland Cottage)’, in Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, revised Ernest de Sélincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), ll. 58‐61, 67‐8.

15. I am indebted here to Hester Jones, ‘Some Literary Treatments of Friendship’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1992).

16. Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, Fragment B, in The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Karina Williamson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), vol. 1, ll. 695ff. Note that the editor, as in the Penguin edition also, places these lines in italics.

17. John Keats, ‘To Mrs Reynolds's Cat’, in The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), ll. 1‐6, 10‐14.

18. Wordsworth, ‘The Kitten and the Falling Leaves’, in Poetical Works, ll. 17‐21, 23‐8. Wordsworth classes it among the ‘Poems of the Fancy’.

19. Smart, Jubilate Agno, Fragment C, in Poetical Works, vol. 1, ll. 721ff.

20. See, for instance, White's description of a bat in The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Richard Mabey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), Letter 11, pp. 35‐6.

21. William Blake, ‘The Tiger’, in The Complete Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson, 2nd edn (London and New York: Longman, 1989).

22. Les Murray, ‘Puss’, in Translations from the Natural World (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993).