The Plague of Rabbits in Poetry

I

THERE is a plague of rabbits in contemporary English poetry. It is a recent development, and, unless something is done to check it, it threatens to upset the proper balance of wild life in that important region. The subspecies which is multiplying so rapidly under the favoring influence of the present-day poetical climate is the Pathetic Rabbit (Lepus cuniculus lamentabilis), and was introduced, if I mistake not, by James Stephens somewhere about 1910, in a poem entitled ‘The Snare,’ which has been in all the anthologies ever since: —

From that time onward, poems about rabbits—pathetic rabbits—have multiplied as rapidly in English literature as the rabbits themselves did when introduced into the virgin pastures of Australia, and it may become necessary to deal with them after the same harsh but effectual manner. They are fast driving out the favorite fauna of the Victorian versifiers, the faithful hound, the romantic stag, the charmingly domestic robin. They are monopolizing the tears of sympathetic readers. Hundreds of other admirable animals, which suffer from the disadvantage of having less liquid eyes or less squeaky voices or a less convincing air of helplessness, are being literally crowded out of poetry. It really is not fair.

The preponderance of rabbits in contemporary poetry would not be so noticeable if different rabbits, in different poems, were doing different things and exhibiting different aspects of the rabbit character and the rabbit life. But they are not. The rabbit in to-day’s poetry has only one function, and that is the same as the function of ‘lovely woman’ who ‘stoops to folly’ in the poetry of an earlier generation — namely, ‘to die.’ Our little furry friend is always either just dead or in the act of dying, or else being hunted or trapped with a view to his death, and with very little chance of his survival.

Listen to D. H. Lawrence on the subject: —

And Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (you will permit me to stretch the term ‘rabbit’ to include the hare, which my dictionary assures me is merely a larger variety of Lepus): —

I have suggested that the rabbit invasion began with James Stephens; but the act which laid open the path for the more helpless and picturesque types of vermin to enter the realm of poetry was of course much earlier. It was Tennyson’s reluctant discovery that nature is ‘red in tooth and claw with ravin,’ a discovery which was subsequently expanded into an entire poem by Eden Phillpotts under the title of ‘Litany to Pan.’ This remarkable poem is a long recital of the cruelties of nature, and Mr. Phillpotts must certainly have been thinking of rabbits when he wrote: —

And about the same time Arthur Christopher Benson was devoting himself largely to a consideration of the supposed sufferings of the more defenseless members of the ‘lower creation’ in a whole series of poems, in which his only reason for neglecting rabbits was that to his particular taste songbirds seemed more pathetic: —

Mr. Benson, it should be noted, had no affection for cats; the rabbit poems are probably written by poets who like cats, because these poets are debarred by their feline sympathies from taking much interest in the fate of birds. But I think most readers will agree that, when it comes to the business of working up the pathos, the rabbit poets have it all over the bird poets, and indeed the poets of any other branch of the animal creation. The gazelle does not do so badly, though it suffers from the disadvantage of emitting a slight aroma of the outmoded romanticism of ‘Lalla Rookh’; a more modern Moore, T. Sturge of that name, has described the pursuit of this graceful animal by a leopard: —

It might just as well be a rabbit, and so might the victim in the very similar poem on ‘The Panther,’ except that Mr. Moore wants a certain exotic beauty in his killers as well as a pathos in his killed, and consequently he has to have all his animals a trifle larger.

II

Now the rabbit is a mildly picturesque animal to contemplate in his native haunts, and a pleasant-tasting animal to consume in a stew. But as a subject for poetry I think he lacks distinction. He is used, and he can be used, for only one kind of emotional effect, and that is the pathetic. And he is valuable to the pursuers of the pathetic only because of the fallacious belief of most poets, and of nearly all readers of poetry, that the behavior of animals indicates the same moral qualities as the same behavior would indicate in human beings.

As a matter of fact, the behavior of the rabbit (and of the gazelle), instead of being the result of the possession of certain moral qualities, is entirely determined by the means of survival with which nature has endowed him. There are three things that the rabbit does supremely well. He propagates his species with extreme fertility; he perceives danger with extreme promptitude; and he runs away from it with extreme speed. He relies entirely on these accomplishments for his survival.

He never tries to kill or beat off his enemy, not because of any high moral standard, but because he has no equipment for doing so. For nourishment he relies entirely upon the vegetable kingdom; but this again is not because he has adopted vegetarianism as a moral principle, like the people who eat in certain restaurants and belong to societies for making the world safe for cows. It is due to the shape of his teeth, and to the lack of equipment for killing any other kind of animal. And so far from sacrificing himself for the general interests of the animal world, the rabbit frequently devours the food supply of other branches of it so completely that they are left to perish of hunger.

There is no more chivalry in the rabbit than there is in any other kind of lower animal; each is for himself and the devil take the hindmost, and the rabbit gets along as well as the next one. I say this not by way of reproach. He is as God made him; let him pass — but let him pass for a rabbit, and not for a pacifist.

For it is as a pacifist, a non-resister, that the rabbit has acquired his immense repute among our contemporary poets. They are against violence among human beings (whether rightly or wrongly it is not within the province of this article to inquire), and quite illogically they therefore admire nonviolence among animals. And for the representation of non-violence among animals they have almost unanimously picked on the rabbit.

There have been admirers of nonresistance in poetry before; but never before have they selected the rabbit as the heraldic emblem of their cause, emblazoned him upon their banner, adopted his squeak as their trumpet call.

Incidentally, the use of animals in this connection has always hitherto been much more consciously symbolic and less realistic than it is in our own day, because previous generations have never ‘read into’ animal psychology so large an amount of human thought and feeling. The rabbit to-day is not merely a symbol, but an exemplar of nonresistance; the lamb, which preceded him as the symbol, was a symbol only, and nobody regarded it as an exemplar or ever dreamed of admiring it for its non-resistant qualities or attributing virtue to it on account of them.

There are very sufficient reasons why pacifistic poetry went in for lambs prior to 1900 and why it goes in for rabbits to-day. Poetry until the close of the nineteenth century was written for people who were still rural, or at least still had a considerable amount of contact with rural life. No population even remotely interested in the rude business of agriculture could ever be asked by its poets to love and admire rabbits, even symbolically. To such a race the rabbit is a pest, a species of vermin, a critter to be got rid of as efficiently as possible, because, if not kept down by constant killing, he will multiply to the ruin of every growing crop. So long as the readers and writers of poetry were to any extent familiar with farm life, the rabbit was excluded from all possible hope of sympathetic treatment in verse.

To an agricultural community a poetically admirable animal must be an agriculturally useful animal, not a destructive one. Until the Industrial Revolution, therefore, the domesticated sheep remained the poetic figure for non-resistance. At the close of the nineteenth century he fell from that position with much suddenness, and for good reason. For the lamb as the type of non-resistance had got itself mixed up with religion; and, as the contemporary poet is ‘off’ religion just as much as he is ‘off’ violence, he had to hunt around for a fresh animal. He hit upon the rabbit, which had never been featured in poetry before except as something nice to hunt and eat, and which therefore was admirably suited to be the bearer of an entirely new set of humanitarian connotations. And he began to ask us, not merely to contemplate the abstract virtue of non-resistance as symbolized by the rabbit, but to sympathize with the rabbit on account of the sufferings which its heroic fidelity to non-resistance imposes upon it. And this, in my opinion, is going too far.

III

We must all die, men and animals alike, and I object to having my feelings harrowed up by the deaths of millions of poetic rabbits, just because the rabbit always suffers assassination and never directly commits it. There is no more reason why I should weep over the death of a rabbit than over the death of a tiger. Morally one animal is as good as the other. Each fulfills his destiny, which consists in being born, keeping alive (at the expense of others) as long as possible, and finally dying, either speedily at the hands of an enemy or slowly by the ravages of disease or starvation. So does a rat; so does a bedbug. Why these tears over rabbits?

These poets are taking an unfair advantage of the fact that nature has done all she can to make the rabbit look pathetic. She has given him, in addition to his non-resisting and vegetarian habits, a pair of expressive eyes, an appealing squeak, and a heart whose beat can be immensely accelerated and strengthened by the stimulus of fear for the purpose of supplying blood to the leg muscles and thus enabling him to make a quick getaway.

These visible manifestations happen to bear a close resemblance to those by which human beings make it apparent to one another that they are alarmed and suffering. But they certainly do not prove that the rabbit is undergoing anything like the degree of agitation that would be indicated by a corresponding degree of heart activity and vocal and optical expressiveness on the part of a human being.

It is extremely difficult to measure either the emotions or the physical sufferings of a rabbit, or of any other of God’s creatures with a different structure from ourselves. The rabbit’s heart acceleration may be — the scientists can doubtless tell us — four or five times as great as that of the rat. But it does not in the least follow that the rabbit is five times as scared as the rat, or suffers five times as much from his fear.

Their defense mechanisms are different. The rat has to stay cool, and fight; the rabbit has to run. A rabbit which stayed cool in the presence of danger would speedily cease to be a rabbit. A rat which did nothing but run away would equally cease to be a rat.

I have myself had a couple of experiences with rabbits from which I am inclined to deduce that their emotional disturbance when alarmed is far from proportional to their physical reactions. True, they were tame rabbits; but the tame rabbit, being accustomed to security throughout its life, should presumably be even more disturbed when that security breaks down than its wild brother which has depended on its own speed in scores of emergencies ever since infancy. On one occasion I was a guest at the head table at a banquet where two rabbits were for some reason brought in and presented to the guest of honor, whose seat was next to mine. They were greeted by the three hundred diners with loud clapping and shouts of applause, which threw them into paroxysms of alarm; but thirty seconds after the applause had died down they were munching the ferns out of the table bouquets as if they had been brought up on after-dinner speeches. Their fear, whatever its intensity, was clearly of the most momentary character.

On another occasion, at a country home where I was visiting, the door of a rabbit hutch was accidentally left open, and the family dog got in about three seconds before the arrival of the young girl who owned and adored the rabbit. The rabbit was dead before it could be rescued; but it was absolutely untouched, and had died of an overstrained heart. It must have been dead within three seconds of becoming aware of the approach of the dog; and while the physical reaction to that approach was enough to kill it (probably owing in part to the enervating results of a life of luxury), the conscious emotional reaction could not possibly be very great in so short a time.

IV

No; the rabbit poets are purporting to give us a rabbit’s-eye view of the universe, from which point of vantage they deduce that it is a bad universe and ask us to deplore that it was ever established.

I do not think these poets can make a convincing case; their use of the rabbit’s liquid eye and wrinkled nose and appealing squeak to bolster up that case strikes me as special pleading of the worst kind. It might be unpleasant for me and Mr. Stephens, who have never been rabbits, to awake some morning and find that we had become rabbits, as Mr. Bultitude awoke to find that he had become a small boy at school; but that would be because we are unaccustomed to the conditions of rabbit life. But to a rabbit it is not unpleasant to be a rabbit. A fairly constant risk of death from foxes and dogs and traps and guns is part of the permanent conditions of rabbitry, and it is safe to assume that rabbits get used to it, just as we human beings get used to the risk of death from bacilli and are beginning to get used to the risk of death from automobiles.

As for the pain of death itself, apart from the pain of fearing it, is there much difference between one form of death and another? Is it much more painful to be eaten alive than to starve or die of thirst? Human beings who have experienced the earlier stages of being eaten, by falling into the clutches of a lion and then being rescued, report that the process is accompanied by a considerable degree of anæsthesia.

But in any case nothing can be done about it. We cannot extend the benefits of euthanasia to the whole sentient creation; we are even hesitant about extending them to our own kind. All that we can do — and that, I think, is what the rabbit poets want us to do — is to regret that the sentient creation exists at all, including ourselves. And that seems to me a futile, unjustified, and on the whole ungrateful proceeding.

In all that I have said I would not for one moment be understood as belittling in the slightest degree the noble work, in which poets have had and still have a large share, of persuading human beings to avoid all avoidable giving of pain to lower creatures. But the argument for that policy lies in man himself — in the magnitude of his power, and the high degree of his sensibility — rather than in the actual severity of the sufferings of the animals themselves. The hawk, the fox, the panther, these have a right to live as well as the thrush, the rabbit, and the gazelle, and they can only live by inflicting death upon other creatures and inflicting it with little regard for suffering. Man has no such limitations; but I do not think he is called upon to resent the character of the universe because the hawk kills chickens in a more brutal manner than man does.

I wish we could get at some idea of the poetry conceived (I suppose I can hardly say written) by rabbits about human beings and their miseries. If the rabbits are anything like as percipient and emotional as our poets make them out to be, they must certainly have some sort of imaginative notion about us. What must they think of the terrible fate of belonging to a section of the animal creation which, not content with contemplating its own sufferings, has to weep futile tears over the necessary and inevitable end of every other kind of animal possessing expressive eyes and an appealing squeak?