ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter engages poems in which conscience and consciousness are negotiated and represented, as response to environmental ethics. Texts dealt with include Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Eighth Elegy (1922/1977), Carl Sandburg’s ‘Buffalo Dusk’ (1920/1970), and Alice Fulton’s poems (2001, 2004). Poems that enlist the imagination of childhood and child/animal presence are selected to discuss the ‘humanimal sensibility’ we have earlier introduced, a new mode of subjectivity structuring a human-perceived affinity among living things in the Anthropocene. We explore ethical dimensions of human action and experience as these relate to animal welfare. Ethics and poetics become indistinguishable in those texts which cast a welcoming gaze at the creature-being-met, equally in those which frame a poetics of resistance to meat made of dead animals. Paradoxes of presence and absence return to the fore in our witness of the world and its literature, as these concern animals today.
