ABSTRACT
William Wordsworth's poetry is rooted in the significance attached to particular, memorialized animal encounters. The permeable boundary between animal and human circumscribes the extent to which Wordsworth explores 'nature'. Wordsworth's Essays upon Epitaphs record the process of mourning, speaking for the other that is inevitably and irrevocably lost into the self in memory. Epitaphs are a chief form of encounter for the poet, in part because they are always already troubled by questions of disembodied voice and memory. Wordsworth extends the gesture of hospitality in language to the creature living and dead in his poetry in an apparent attempt to create a space in which human and non-human animal, past and present self alike can live together, reminiscent of the space created when Neil Hertz introduces Wordsworth to Milton's Adam. The white doe enters the poem through a graveyard just after the surrounding populace has been called, like cattle, to worship at Belton's mouldering Priory.
