Dickey's poetry-Take Two: The Sheep Child

After our discussions about some of Dickey’s poetry, I feel that many of us, including myself, may have over-analyzed his works. We were creating symbols when the story lines were actually fairly straight forward and were trying to make the poems about race relations because many of the Southern works we explored were about race. For example, I thought The Heaven of Animals, while applying to animals, was also possibly a metaphor for African Americans and whites. However, now that I know Dickey was not African American or a race activist, I see his poems from a different light. Also, Walking on Water had confused me very much because I again thought that the boy’s movement on the water was symbolic and metaphorical, when in actuality he was gliding on a plank. He did have a spiritual experience, but I needed a more literal approach to the poem.

So, now as I look at The Sheep Child for a second time, I am thinking that maybe the sheep child is not a metaphor for something but is actually a creature that is half sheep and half human. And that’s disgusting.

Dickey starts out explaining something from the past, and he uses the split-line form that we discussed him using in Falling. This caused me to make abrupt halts when reading it and gave the sense that what I was reading about was a taboo subject and sort of unspeakable. It seemed as though the narrator was having a difficult time explaining the scenario and was choosing his or her words carefully. Yet the message is seemingly that farm boys have a strong sexual desire to have sex or sex-like relations with just about anything. This is a stereotype I have heard about adolescent farmers; they have prolific sex, which explains the stereotypical abundance of bare-foot red-neck children.

In stanza two, Dickey continues explaining and setting the scene, revealing that there is one example of what happens when a man mates with a sheep. There is a sheep child that is preserved in a museum because it did not survive. While creating even a stillbirth sheep child seems highly improbable or impossible, it is an interesting and grotesque thought. The line, “his eyes / Are open but you can’t stand to look,” caught my attention because it expressed a sad sentiment that I imagine would characterize the life of a creature such as this if it could survive. The openness of the eyes indicates to me that the sheep child is longing for attention, but no one can look at it because it is such a shameful and disgusting creature. The creation is isolated.

The next stanza expresses that the events of this poem are something from the past; there is a sense of nostalgia, like with the dying out of the Old South. The farm boys who once tried to mate with sheep now have “true wives” that are humans and logical partners, unlike the sheep, and have taken their women to the city. However, the sheep child still exists and again is talking through its eyes. Dickey then switches to the voice of the sheep child, indicated by his switch to italics.

In the words of the sheep, there are repeated phrases indicating the emotionally taxing nature of being the product of two different environments. First he explains that he is “half of [his father’s] world” but came into the world in the “long grass” that belonged to his sheep mother. Later a striking image is created as the sheep child says, “My hoof and my hand clasped each other,” and readers really get the sense of how unnatural this creation is. Even though I do not think that the sheep child is necessarily a metaphor for how biracial children may feel, this poem did remind me of Frederick Douglass’ account of how slaves who were fathered by their white masters felt. These children did not really fit in anywhere and were treated worse by the whites since they were the product of a scandalous affair. The sheep child had no real place either and was also the product of a scandal.

I also think that the sheep child’s words evoke great emotion and pity. He identifies with his mother’s fearfulness in “Listening for foxes” or danger. He also feels his mothers burden in giving birth “as she must do” since she has no control over the matter. The mother is sobbing as she gives birth and the sheep child enters the world and dies. The death of the sheep child also is repeated in his account of his life, probably because that is the essence of his life. I think the most heart-wrenching line is, “I ate my one meal / Of milk, and died / Staring,” because again the sheep child is searching for his place, for someone to accept and love him. However, he never finds it and dies still searching.

The end of the poem suggests that the sheep child’s existence haunts farm boys and prevents them from having sex with animals. He lives on in their minds and, “drives / Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf / And from the chaste ewe.” A ewe is a sheep and by describing it as chaste, it seems as though the sheep child feels as though it was fully the human’s fault for creating the sheep child. This poem seems to show that humans need to be responsible and emphasizes that there are fundamental differences between animals and humans. They are not meant to procreate together, and I find it ironic that the sheep child seems more thoughtful than the human farm boys. This poem portrays the relationship of animals and humans very differently than Dickey’s other ones, such as A Dog Sleeping on My Feet and Walking on Water, where they coexist amicably or even symbiotically. The Sheep Child essentially seems to say that there are limitations to they types of relationships humans and animals should have.