“Easily domesticated and bred”

Canary poems featured in nineteenth-century periodicals mark the intersection of two major discourses of the era: notions of the idealized domestic space and evolving understandings of the human/non-human animal relationship. The authors of such poetry—many anonymous, others as notable as Matthew Arnold—depict the popular pet birds as cheerful companions and moral guides. Simultaneously, though, the poets deny canaries’ sentience and suppress their wildness in order to control the birds’ cultural power. This article examines how poets contain canaries through linguistic and physical domination: acts of “taming” facilitated by poets’ attempts to ignore, erase, or justify avian (and by extension, human) suffering as a necessary component of the processes of domestication.