Richard Wilbur's "Beasts" expresses nostalgia for a lost Eden, not of childhood, but of unconscious animal existence. Evil is man's alone, created by recognition of suffering and intensified by human efforts to resolve or lessen it. Thus the animals dwell in "major freedom." Wilbur's survey of the chain of being progresses from beasts to man by way of the halfway creature, the werewolf. (One remembers that in traditional descriptions of the chain, man occupies this position.) Reason is now the substitute for transcendent divinity, but it brings with it disintegrating harmony: "major" to "minor"; "concordance" to discord; peace to war; "slumber" to waking, present contentment to unsatisfied yearning.

"Beasts" is unified by pervasive musical imagery. Phrases that first appear to be a series of playful, localized metaphors gradually emerge by the end of the second stanza as a unifying motif and then as a symbolic reminder of the traditional discordia concors metaphor, an explanation for the usefulness of evil in the harmony of the whole creation. The first two stanzas portray the animal world "where though all things differ, all agree." This world is suffused with harmony, a completeness and interdependence between the beasts and nature…. [The] creatures are neither alien nor fearful, even of death.

The continuous presence of the moon guides the reader through this survey of creation. The beasts' responses to its light also illustrate the loss of harmony which accompanies developing consciousness. Among the animals, the moon is an active participant, a member of the company…. But among men, its light leads to harm and darkness. Wholly passive, observed rather than observing, its results are baleful.

The werewolf provides a modulation between the two modes of being, the "major" and minor freedom. (p. 27)

The werewolf's painful reversion is accomplished as other men, "far from thicket and pad-fall," also watch the moon. These observers find its beauty "painful" and their response illustrates the felt intervention of consciousness. Man, the scholar, at his most conscious and remote from nature, "construes" the "lucid mood" and the "risen hunter." The moon moves him, but the very adjectives are the attributions of his perception. Like the werewolf's windowglass, the lens of man's consciousness separates him from nature. Man reads the book of nature rather than experiencing it as the gull does. He construes—interprets, analyzes, in an attempt to discover the structure and sense. (pp. 27-8)

Wilbur distinguishes between "beasts" and "monsters"; all beasts belong to nature (man included), but man alone brings "monsters into the cities, crows on the public statues." The city symbolizes civilization, the height of man's conscious ordering, but also his alienation and fall from nature….

"Beasts" ironically reverses the spiral structure of poems like "The Ancient Mariner" which also deal with the relation of human consciousness to nature. We end in the "dark unbridled waters,"… in a darkness of ignorance and perverted potential…. Such darkness is unknown to the animals that cannot strive or seek, betray and fail. The poem suggests a grim reversal of the Faust myth enacted in a universe without transcendence: man's striving intellect, imperfect and thus continually failing, leads him to damnation. (p. 28)