[In the following essay, Smith describes Dickey's “poetic faith” as a sense of belief in nature illustrated most clearly in his hunting poems and in the mystic visions of his 1970 volume Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy.]

Dissociating himself from the contemporary mode of cultivated cynicism, James Dickey refers to himself in Self-Interviews (1970) as a “born believer.” It is this capacity for belief that is a dominant characteristic of his poetry. It is a poetry of acceptance and celebration in the manner of Whitman. Dickey's faith is rooted in nature: nature is teacher and life-giver, and his reverence for nature is manifest in a primitive, almost totemic treatment of animals. The poet finds a brother in the owl, the deer, the bull. Hunting, once necessary for human survival, has become for him a ritual, a means of entering into a kind of communion with the hunted animal. Yet, while his faith is rooted in nature, it flowers in myth.

A good introduction to the poetic faith of Dickey is his “The Heaven of Animals.” This paradoxically entitled poem evinces a latitudinarian attitude, accepting in the realm of immortality these soullness, mindless creatures: “Having no souls, they have come, / Anyway, beyond their knowing.” It is not the knowledge of the animals but their instinct, a natural force which he subscribes to wholeheartedly, that raises them into heaven; this state of life after death appears as the ultimate flowering of the instinct: “Their instincts wholly bloom / And they rise. / The soft eyes open.” The animal heaven does not exclude the violence of the hunt. Rather than tamper with the instinct of the carnivore, the poet perfects its tooth and claw:

For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,
More deadly than they can believe.

“The lion would not really be a lion,” Dickey explains in Self Interviews, “if, as the Bible says, the lion lies down with the lamb. It would be the form of the lion but not the spirit.” In heaven, the carnivore's instinctual spring, its most characteristic and fulfilling action, is blissfully extended: “their descent / Upon the bright backs of their prey / May take years / In a sovereign floating of joy.” The victims in Dickey's animal heaven fulfill themselves as victims. The poet does modify nature here to the extent that he eliminates the fear and pain that earthly prey would feel:

And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk
Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain
At the cycle's center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.

Calling upon the cyclical nature of life, the poet is able to maintain his vision. The poem ends with an emphasis upon nature's unceasing movement toward renewal.

The relationship between nature and faith is better illustrated by the poem “Trees and Cattle,” in which Dickey successfully attempts to integrate man with nature to achieve that precious “feeling of wholeness” referred to in Self Interviews. “What I want more than anything else,” he explains, “is to have a feeling of wholeness. Specialization has produced some extremely important things, like penicillin and heart transplants. But I don't know how much they compensate for the loss of a sense of intimacy with the natural process. I think you would be very hard-put, for example, to find a more harmonious relationship to an environment than the American Indians had. We can't return to a primitive society; surely this is obvious. But there is a property of the mind which, if encouraged, could have this personally animistic relationship to things.” In the dreamlike “Trees and Cattle,” the poet finds himself standing in a sun-soaked autumn pasture, where he realizes his bond with other living things; in a scene shimmering with potential, he is suddenly aware of immortality.

The poem opens with a view of the trees, emphasizing unshaded sunlight and golden leaves—an image so intense that it threatens to evaporate:

Many trees can stand unshaded
In this place where the sun is alone,
But some may break out.
They may be taken to Heaven,
So gold is my only sight.

A sense of wonder, of infinite value, of potentiality has been introduced into the poem. Identifying with the trees, the poet lets two slowly moving cows step into the picture: “Through me, two red cows walk; / From a crowning glory / Of slowness they are not taken.” The red cows share the potentiality of the golden trees in that the ambling cattle may paradoxically turn the dried-up field into a conflagration: “Let one hoof knock on a stone, / And off it a spark jump quickly, / And fire may sweep these fields, / And all outburn the blind sun.” There is a potential brilliance here akin to that of Hopkins' embers that “gash gold-vermilion.”

The light imagery, with light as a metaphor for life, is continued in terms of a briefly burning flame. The poet, caught up in the same cyclic process as the trees, identifies with them as he suggests the sacred nature of the life-death cycle:

Like a new light I enter my life,
And hover, not yet consumed,
With the trees in holy alliance,
About to be offered up,
About to get wings where we stand.

The introduction of “wings,” prepared for in the first stanza, transforms an idea of imminent death into one of imminent rebirth. The potentiality of the autumn scene is emphasized further before it is actualized in the form of a bull emerging from the sunlight. Identifying with the bull, the poet has a new sense of the immediacy of existence:

The whole field stammers with gold,
No leaf but is actively still;
There is no quiet or noise;
Continually out of a fire
A bull walks forth,
And makes of my mind a red beast
At each step feeling how
The sun more deeply is burning
Because trees and cattle exist.

The poet is more aware of the sun, more aware of his own vitality, because he is aware of the trees and the cattle, because he has identified his light with theirs.

The poem concludes with the poet leaving the field of light and losing his potency, his vision, his very life; for he was given his heart “in some earthly way”: “I go away, in the end. / In the shade, my bull's horns die / From my head; in some earthly way / I have been given my heart.” But there is a sudden reversal in the final stanza as the poet proceeds to amplify the statement about his “earthly” nature:

Behind my back, a tree leaps up
On wings that could save me from death.
Its branches dance over my head.
Its flight strikes a root in me.
A cow beneath it lies down.

The image of the tree rising up with life suggests, as it did earlier in the poem, the idea of rebirth. The imminent renewal of the tree will save the poet who is of the same earth. The fact of renewal “strikes a root” in him as he identifies once more with the trees and cattle.

Dickey's identification with the life-renewing bull in “Trees and Cattle” looks forward to his hunting poems, where the primitive, totemic relationship between man and animal emerges more clearly. Hunting, for Dickey, is a way of achieving “rapport with the animal.” In Self-Interviews, he explains: “the main thing is to re-enter the cycle of the man who hunts for his food. Now this may be playacting at being a primitive man, but it's better than not having any rapport with the animal at all. … I have a great sense of renewal when I am able to go into the woods and hunt with a bow and arrow, to enter into the animal's world in this way.” In “Springer Mountain,” the hunter not only goes into the woods but also rids himself of civilization in the form of his clothing to run naked with a deer, which has moved down the mountain “in step with the sun.” When the hunter removes his clothes, “the world catches fire.” With the “green of excess” upon him, he moves with the buck toward the stream of renewal—“Winding down to the waters of life / Where they stand petrified in a creek bed / Yet melt and flow from the hills / At the touch of an animal visage.” The nature of the renewal is suggested when the hunter speaks of being “For a few steps deep in the dance / Of what I most am and should be / And can be only once in this life.”

In “Approaching Prayer,” the poet carries his identification with the hunted animal to the point of taking upon himself the consciousness of a boar, fatally wounded by the hunter's arrow. The projection begins on a literal level, as the poet covers his head with a hollow boar's head, donning the trophy like a primitive priest. The poet advances to a more spiritual level of projection as he imagines the last sensations of the hog:

The man is still; he is stiller; still
.....Something comes out of him
Like a shaft of sunlight or starlight.
I go forward toward him.
.....With light standing through me,
Covered with dogs, but the water
Tilts to the sound of the bowstring
.....The sound from his fingers,
Like a plucked word, quickly pierces
Me again, the trees try to dance
Clumsily out of the wood.

(An interesting note to this poem is unintentionally provided by Geoffrey Norman in “The Stuff of Poetry” (Playboy, 1971). Commenting on Dickey's “fine mimetic flair,” Norman writes that “his crowd stopper is … a razorback hog. He can draw his big shoulders into a tight droop, thrust his broad forehead out and begin bobbing and snorting until he actually does resemble an old razorback.”)

Another one of Dickey's “totems” is the owl, winged hunter and seer, which dominates the forest of the night. The owl looms larger than life in Dickey's recent novel, Deliverance (1970), where it perches on the tent of the canoeists during their first night in the woods. An omen of the man-hunting to come, the owl spends the night seeking out prey. The narrator hunts with him in his imagination: “I imagined what he was doing while he was gone, floating through the trees, seeing everything. I hunted with him as well as I could, there in my weightlessness. The woods burned in my head. Toward morning I could reach up and touch the claw without turning on the light.” In the poem “The Owl King,” there is another, more obviously ritualistic encounter between man and owl in the dark woods: an owl teaches a blind child to see.

The first part of this long, three-part poem is from the point of view of the blind child's father. The child has been lost in the woods and, as Dickey explains in Self-Interviews, the father is “trying to furnish his blind son with an audible point of reference toward which the child can come, some kind of continuous sound.” The father describes his call as “a sound I cannot remember. / It whispers like straw in my ear, / And shakes like a stone under water. / My bones stand on tiptoe inside it.” Drifting into the forest, the sound forms a kind of magical ring “Round a child with a bird gravely dancing.” The father's cry is echoed by the owl king's song, which comes back out of the woods “touching every tree upon the hill.” Entranced by the strange music that he has produced, the father instructs the blind child: “Come, son, and find me here, / In love with the sound of my voice. / Come calling the same soft song, / And touching every tree upon the hill.” The child will be led out of the forest to the father by ritualistically touching each tree as the song did.

In the second part of the poem, the point of view shifts from the father to the totemic owl. In Self-Interviews, Dickey describes the bird as “the quintessential owl, the immortal owl … kind of a Nietzschean owl who is able to see in the dark by an act of will over a long period of time. … He eventually controls the night forest completely because he's the only one who can see and fly.” The owl king's story begins:

I swore to myself I would see
When all but my seeing had failed.
Every light was too feeble to show
My world as I knew it must be.
At the top of the staring night
I sat on the oak in my shape
With my claws growing deep into wood
And my sight going slowly out
Inch by inch, as into a stone …

The owl's vision is similar to that set forth in “The Heaven of Animals”; it juxtaposes the hunter-victim ecology with the idea of the continuity of life. The owl sees “rabbits running / Beneath my bent growing throne, / And the foxes lighting their hair, / And the serpent taking the shape / Of the stream of life as it slept.” The interior nature of the vision, similar in its archetypal aspect to that of “The Eye-Beaters”—another poem about blind children—is emphasized as the speaker elaborates upon his act of will: “That night I parted my lids / … and saw dark burn / Greater than sunlight or moonlight, / For it burned from deep within me.” This return to the primitive, instinctual past is emphasized later when the child, having regained his sight, utters the Roethke-like paradox: “I see as the owl kings sees, / By going in deeper than darkness.”

The encounter between the owl king and the blind child, touched upon in the first part of the poem, is elaborated here from the owl's point of view:

Through trees at his light touch trembling
The blind child drifted to meet me,
His blue eyes shining like mine.
In a ragged clearing he stopped,
And I circled, beating above him,
Then fell to the ground and hopped
Forward, taking his hand in my claw.
Every tree's life lived in his fingers.

Life moves from the trees through the child's fingers into the claw of the owl. The unitary character of life, apparent in these lines, is made even more explicit in the dance of the creatures that follows: “Gravely we trod with each other / As beasts at their own wedding, dance.” The music to which they dance is the song of the father, described “As though the one voice of us both.” The ritual-like dance performed, the owl teaches the blind boy to see; the child's vision is similar to that of his teacher: “The mouse in its bundle of terror, / The fox in the flame of its hair, / And the snake in the form of all life.” Part two concludes with the expression of the speaker's will that “All dark shall come to light.”

The action of the poem is given its fullest and most exquisite expression in the third and final part—the child's story. It begins with the child's movement into the forest, a journey beautifully expressed in terms of motor and tactile perceptions:

I am playing going down
In my weight lightly,
Down, down the hill.
.....A leaf falls on me,
It must be a leaf I hear it
Be thin against me, and now
The ground is level
It moves it is not ground,
My feet flow cold
And wet, and water rushes
Past as I climb out.

Having crossed the barrier between the human and animal worlds, the child enters the forest. He is suddenly aware of the presence of the owl in the tree overhead before it floats to the earth to take him by the hand. To the music of the sighing father, the dance begins:

The huge bird bows and returns,
For I, too, have done the same
As he leads me, rustling,
A pile of leaves in my hands;
The dry feathers shuffle like cards
On his dusty shoulders.

Like the brothers in Dickey's poem “In the Tree House at Night,” the owl and the child climb into the branches of a living tree, where in the light of the moon the child will learn to see: “I learn from the master of sight / What to do when the sun is dead, / How to make the great darkness work / As it wants of itself to work.” The boy's eyes open to nature—to the coiled snake, to the hunting fox:

A creature is burning itself
In a smoke of hair through the bushes.
The fox moves; a small thing
Being caught, cries out,
And I understand
How beings and sounds go together;
I understand
The voice of my singing father.
I shall be king of the wood.

The vision leads to understanding; understanding, to power—control. Crossing the symbolic creek again (“a religious fire / Streaming my ankles away”), the child returns to his home. His father, under the spell of “the endless beauty / Of his grief-stricken singing and calling” is baying to the moon: “He is singing simply to moonlight, / Like a dog howling, / And it is holy song / Out of his mouth.” The father's singing has become a mindless, instinctive, natural act—in Dickey's view “holy.” The poem concludes with the son identifying with his father and confessing his faith:

                                                                                Father, I touch
Your face. I have not seen
My own, but it is yours.
I come, I advance,
I believe everything, I am here.

The conclusion of the poem, as Dickey put it in Self-Interviews, is “an act of total acceptance of the world through the figure of the child.” The child, like Dickey, is a “born believer.”

Dickey's statement of faith in “The Owl King” has a certain mythic quality. The poem resembles the medieval dream vision, where a bird or animal often acts as a guide for the dreamer. There is a cyclical pattern involved, with the child moving away from his father, into the woods, and back to his father again. The child's experience can be seen, on one level at least, as a form of renewal in the manner of “Springer Mountain.” The father, involved with loss and expression, can be seen as the poet. Dickey is clearly not dealing with any of the traditional myths as he was in “The Vegetable King,” which treats the theme of renewal in terms of the death and resurrection of a sacrificial king. He is working with something new. As Joseph Campbell has observed, with the decay of the traditional myths or religions, it is the creative artist who must provide us with a new mythology. In “Man & Myth” (Psychology Today, 1971) Campbell explains: “In traditional societies the symbols and myths that were the vehicles of social values were presented in socially maintained rites that the individual was required to experience. All the meaning was in the group, none in the self expressive individual. The creative mythology of the modern artist arises when the individual has an experience of his own—of order, or horror, or beauty—that he tries to communicate by creating a private mythology. So it is the creative individual who must give us a totally new type of nontheological revelation, who must be the new spiritual guide.” Although Campbell did not have him in mind, Dickey is one of those modern artists who is creating a new mythology.

The first of the title poems of Dickey's latest collection of poems, The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970) is another, ultimately more successful mythic vision. Confronted by the horror of blindness among children, the poet creates a mitigating fiction: the children in their darkness tap the collective unconscious, the repository of vital images of the primitive past. The poem opens with an account of an arrival at a children's home, where the visitor is met by a group of young people who have gone blind. The children, whose arms are tied to their sides, fight to free themselves: “they holler howl till they can shred / Their gentle ropes whirl and come loose.” Their arms free, the blind children “smash their eyeballs” with their fists to generate the only light available to them—“sparks.” With the help of the visitor's imagination, these sparks are transformed into images from the collective unconscious: “In the asylum, children turn to go back / Into the race: turn their heads without comment into the black magic / Migraine of caves.” Returning to the cave of their Stone Age fathers, the blind children watch a primitive artist draw:

                                                                                          There, quiet children stand watching
A man striped and heavy with pigment, lift his hand with color coming
From him. Bestial, working like God, he moves on stone he is drawing
A half-cloud of beasts on the wall. They crane closer, helping, beating
Harder, light blazing inward from their fists and see see leap
From the shocked head-nerves, great herds of deer …

Opening his eyes for a moment to the afternoon sun, the visitor sees it as a “painfully blazing fist of a ball of fire / God struck from His one eye.” The outer world is immediately negated by the inner, which is presented in lines that wonderfully suggest the desperate frenzy of creativity:

                                                                                          No; you see only dead beasts playing
In the bloody handprint on the stone where God gropes like a man
Like a child, for animals where the artist hunts and slashes, glowing
Like entrail-blood, tracking the wounded game across the limestone
As it is conceived. The spoor leads          his hand changes          grows
Hair like a bison horns like an elk unshapes in a deer-leap emerges
From the spear-pitted rock, becoming what it can make unrolling
Not sparing itself clenching re-forming rising          beating
For life.

God striking the sun becomes the cave man drawing in blood becomes the blind child beating its eyes. All are engaged in a desperate magic.

The visitor is interrupted at this point by his reason, which tells him that what he sees “in the half-inner sight / Of squinting, are only … children whose hands are tied away / From them for their own good children waiting to smash their dead / Eyes, live faces, to see nothing.” Admitting to his fiction, the visitor explains that he is trying to “Re-invent the vision of the race knowing the blind must see / By magic or nothing.” He admits further that the fiction is necessary for his own survival:

                                                                                          … it helps me to think
That they can give themselves, like God from their scabby fists, the original
Images of mankind: that when they beat their eyes, I witness how
I survive in my sun-blinded mind: that the beasts are calling to God
And man for art, when the blind open wide and strike their incurable eyes.

The visitor's predicament is that of modern man: rationalism (the sun) has blinded him to the art, or myths, of his ancestors; to survive, he needs new art.

Reason, interrupting, insists that there is “For the blind nothing but blackness forever nothing but a new bruise / Risen upon the old.” The visitor stresses again the indispensable nature of vision: “In the palm of the hand the color red is calling / For blood the forest-fire roars on the cook-stone, smoke smothered and lightning- / born and the race hangs on meat and illusion hangs on nothing / But a magical art.” Creating a myth to secure psychological sustenance, the visitor is working with magic as the Stone Age artist worked with magic in painting pictures of animals on the cave wall to secure success in the hunt.

The poem ends as the visitor, deliberately rejecting reality for illusion, enters the cave to assume the persona of the Stone Age hunter-artist. The vague “you” of the preceding part of the poem is now “I”:

                                                                                          It is time for the night
Hunt, and the wild meat of survival. The wall glimmers that God and man
Never forgot. I have put history out. An innocent eye, it is closed
Off, outside in the sun. Wind moans like an artist. The tribal children lie
On their rocks in their animal skins seeing in spurts of eye-beating
Dream, the deer, still wet with creation, open its image to the heart's
Blood, as I step forward, as I move through the beast-paint of the stone,
Taken over, submitting, brain-weeping.

Not stopping here, the visitor steps back further into darkness as he projects into the animals that he is creating as hunter-artist. It is the totemic deer of “Springer Mountain” that he identifies with specifically:

                                                                                          Beast, get in
My way. Your body opens onto the plain. Deer, take me into your life-
lined form. I merge, I pass beyond in secret in perversity and the sheer
Despair of invention          my double-clear bifocals off          my reason gone
Like eyes … Give me my spear.

With the call for a spear, the magical identification with the primitive hunter-artist is completed—and in a daringly literal way as usual.

On a certain level of abstraction, “The Eye-Beaters” can be read as a statement about art, or more specifically poetry. The poet-visitor himself is the “eye-beater”; blinded by the sun, he beats his eyes for the chance spark that may leap through his brain. Modern rationalism has cut him off from the healing, life-sustaining roots of his past. His only salvation is a journey down the years, into the darkness of the collective unconscious, the cave—to enter into the “life- / lined form” of the deer “still wet with creation.” Dickey's stance is directly opposed to any art for-art's-sake aesthetic; art for him is a bloody business—“the artist hunts and slashes” in “the sheer / Despair of invention.” Art is as vital to life as eating. The poem is a wonderful statement of Dickey's faith in the primitive, mythmaking power of man.

An important constant, then, in Dickey's work is his poetic faith, which is manifest throughout—from Into the Stone (1957) to The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970). This faith, however, has not prevented the emergence of a growing sense of man's mortality, which is particularly evident in the latest collection of poems. This darkening of Dickey's vision is especially evident when “The Owl King” is compared to “The Eye-Beaters.” The blind child who blesses the trees as he moves with confidence through the forest is replaced by the institutionalized child who has to be restrained from striking his blind eyes. The singing of the one poem is reduced to the moaning of the other. The vision comes easily, naturally in “The Owl King”; painfully in “The Eye-Beaters.” Despite these differences, both poems reflect a fundamental trust in the basic instincts of man. The most important of these natural forces, which man shares with other living things, is the power of self-renewal. “There is a wing-growing motion / Half-alive in every creature,” Dickey has written in “Reincarnation (II),” and it is this motion that is dealt with in one way or another in many of his poems.