At Play in the Fields of Fliskets, Zant, and Fred

Jawseus charlottei (Illustration: Calene Luczo/http://www.luczoillustration.com/)

I happened to come across two lovely poems this morning about the challenge of naming the animals.  The first is by John Hollander.*

                                 Adam’s Task

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field … GEN. 2:20

Thou, paw-paw-paw; thou, glurd; thou, spotted

Glurd; thou, whitestap, lurching through

The high-grown brush; thou, pliant-footed,

Implex; thou, awagabu.

Every burrower, each flier

Came for the name he had to give:

Gay, first work, ever to be prior,

Not yet sunk to primitive.

Thou, verdle; thou, McFleery’s pomma;

Thou; thou; thou—three types of grawl;

Thou, flisket; thou, kabasch; thou, comma-

Eared mashawk; thou, all; thou, all.

Were, in a fire of becoming,

Laboring to be burned away,

Then work, half-measuring, half-humming,

Would be as serious as play.

Thou, pambler; thou, rivarn; thou, greater

Wherret, and thou, lesser one;

Thou, sproal; thou, zant; thou, lily-eater.

Naming’s over. Day is done.

The second poem comes from Anthony Hecht, in roughly the same spirit:

                      Naming the Animals

Having commanded Adam to bestow

Names upon all the creatures, God withdrew

To empyrean palaces of blue

That warm and windless morning long ago,

And seemed to take no notice of the vexed

Look on the young man’s face as he took thought

Of all the miracles the Lord had wrought,

Now to be labelled, dubbed, yclept, indexed.

Before an addled mind and puddled brow,

The feathered nation and the finny prey

Passed by; there went biped and quadruped.

Adam looked forth with bottomless dismay

Into the tragic eyes of his first cow,

And shyly ventured, “Thou shalt be called ‘Fred.’”

I am sending these poems out to all the discouraged taxonomists out there, contemplating how to name 100 new ants, or ground beetles, or flies.  Bring on those pommas and pamblers!

* Personal note: I once signed up for Hollander’s poetry class as an undergraduate, then, fool that I was, forgot to attend.  I discovered this lapse, to my horror, two weeks before semester’s end.  Hollander, bless him, gave me a “high pass” anyway.  Academic standards were gentler then.