“Perhaps the best one can hope to do when writing in the voice of an animal is urgently point to one’s own ignorance.“
Content warning: animal cruelty, war
Elephant in Hannibal’s Army
The trees spit venom here. The stones bite,
whitely cracking under me, and slide
stinging wetness into the cracks of my pads.
Uphill. Gray-white. Men make fires, lie down
in snow. Most rise; not all. The mountain drowns
me in softness; the moldy Spanish straw they feed
me wriggles with rats; the heavenly air derides
my lowland lungs. The men are itching for a fight.
Next dawn, we pass a smaller me, dawn-stiff,
bestrewn with butchering men who stuff bits
of trunk in saddlebags, cracking jokes. Far off,
the mountain shouts, and something frozen splits
inside me. My mind falls down. Skies descend,
and all the uphill, hell-white world caves in.
Your poem seems to offer the perspective of an animal. How did you seek to represent a language or form that could suitably represent the mental processes of the elephant?
Attempting to represent the consciousness of an animal is perhaps no more bizarre than attempting to represent the consciousness of another person, or even oneself. Either way, you are leaping into an abyss, clutching a slender rope of imagination. Maybe that is too grandiose. No matter the speaker (elephant, persona, lyric “I”), there is a great deal of mystery involved. Writing poems from animal perspectives is helpful insofar as it defamiliarizes the world. We are used to looking at the world through tired human eyes and ignoring the miraculous. Animal eyes can jolt us awake. (Consider the animal poems of Ted Hughes and Les Murray.) As for form, the sonnet is perhaps an indefensible choice for representing the mind of an elephant: sonnets are courtly, ordered, and highly artificial. And who knows about the courtliness of an elephant? I do find the sonnet useful for enacting the claustrophobic suddenness and sharp turns of actual thought. Perhaps the best one can hope to do when writing in the voice of an animal is urgently point to one’s own ignorance. Animals have inner lives, and it seems equally damaging to the dignity of that inner life to (a) pretend it does not exist and (b) sentimentalize it. All animal poems are brittle fictions insofar as they employ human language. Nevertheless I believe there can be truth-magic in them.
What sort of statement, if at all, were you seeking to assert regarding animal entrapment, and combat?
I sought no statement, only experience. There is something inherently tragic about elephants, and something fascinating about war elephants, and of course the Carthaginian practice of spurring drunken elephants into battle seems cruel to us, but I was attracted only to the challenge of inhabiting a war elephant’s mind. Which again, is an absurd thing to attempt. Specifically I was drawn to the fear and awkwardness those elephants must have felt when they were made to climb into the snow and ice.
Why did you wish to write a poem influenced by an historical event, and one that has been represented in art? How did previous accounts, visual or otherwise, of Hannibal’s military venture influence your poem? Or, did you strive to offer a different perspective entirely?
Hannibal crossing the Alps invokes epic notions. One thinks of his military genius, his daring, and perhaps that he was slightly insane. His victories over the Roman army at Trebia and Trasimene are satisfying to study because he broke the great Roman military machine, that symbol of annihilating Apollonian order. Why an elephant? Maybe I wanted to inhabit the mind of a being who was indifferent to the human narratives that swept the Carthaginian army along. Maybe I just wanted to think about an elephant bewildered by ice. As for paintings, Poussin made a pathos-inducing elephant who looks diffident and scrawny. I am drawn to his awkwardness. JMW Turner painted a magnificent atmosphere in Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, an atmosphere that drives home the helplessness the entire army must have felt. Even an elephant feels small in a snowstorm.
Forester McClatchey
Forester McClatchey (he/him) is a poet and critic from Atlanta, GA. He was a finalist for the 2023 Anthony Hecht Award, the 2023 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the 2023 Able Muse Book Prize. His work appears in 32 Poems, The Hopkins Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Five Points, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. He teaches at Atlanta Classical Academy.
How I Write a Poem is our bi-monthly interview series digging in to the nitty-gritty of poetry writing. Explore the full series here.
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