This kind of subject matter — a human being having sex with another species and giving birth to a hybrid creature — is usually reserved for the pages of The National Enquirer where its sensational aspects can be exploited to the fullest. Dickey is in dangerous territory here, trying to serve up the salacious as serious, and only the excellence of the rest of the poem — and perhaps Dickey’s dogged, unfailing commitment to the premise — keeps him from falling off his tightrope. It opens plainly enough, plainly that is for Dickey whose Biblical rhetoric has become a hallmark of his style. The language, at first, is straightforward. There’s a legend (today we’d call it an urban myth) among farm boys in Georgia that one of them once had sex with a sheep that became pregnant with the boy’s “child” which later died and was taken to Atlanta to be studied by biologists and preserved in formaldehyde before being forgotten in the back of some museum. This is all related in an offhand, almost conversational manner. The poem does not shift into a higher rhetorical gear until Dickey reaches the lines:

Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?

It is that word “terrible” more than anything else that signals, even effects, a change in the poem’s mood. When the sheep child himself begins to speak, in italics, the tone becomes even more formal, elevated in diction and manner:

I am here, in my father’s house,
I who am half of your world came deeply
To my mother in the long grass…

A voice has emerged, a powerful presence, who sounds like a prophet or an oracle. What follows is perhaps the most precarious part of the poem. Dickey has to sell us the far-fetched idea — not that a human being has sexual intercourse with a sheep — but that the act somehow has gravity and even grandeur. He accomplishes this mostly through language, phrases of a solemn beauty that counteract our tendency to laugh at what is occurring as merely perverse: “she stood like moonlight / listening for foxes…” “something like love from another world…” “she dipped her face / farther into the chill of the earth…” These moments help negate the impulse we have to guffaw at “seized from behind” and “gave… her best self to that need.” A sheep giving her best self? Can a sheep even be said to have a best self? And can we conceive of a sheep giving herself in an act of tenderness and compliance? The absurdity of this threatens to overwhelm Dickey’s attempt to convince us of the profound nature of the act. At any moment the poem here might easily devolve into mere sexual comedy.

The magic of Dickey’s imagination affords us a revelation without compromising our sanity. He has connected us to unusual levels of perception and brought us back illuminated and unscarred.

It only barely — but just barely in my opinion — escapes that.

The words “mother” and “father” in this context take on a resonance and meaning not otherwise associated with them. Familial relationships are skewed. Though the sheep child refers to his parents as any child might, this is only a “family” in the biological sense. No one, I think, can keep a straight face and imagine them gathering happily for a reunion. The terms “mother” and “father” may be accurate, but that doesn’t mean they are any less bizarre.

If the reader has been able to make his or her way through the passage above without balking, the following stanzas might reward anyone’s capacity for openness and empathy. Now the sheep child has simply become a fact, as worthy of our pity and fear as any malformed child tragically afflicted in the womb. The sheep child may be a monstrous thing, but it is still conscious and alive and therefore, as it were, a fellow creature deserving of compassion. The poem, from this point onward, rises to a level of emotion and vision not easily managed by any poet. To be able to articulate, in what appears to be the simplest language, the experience of the sheep child from his peculiar half-human perspective is a daunting task, one that any writer might fail to fulfill. To allow us to see “for a blazing moment / The great grassy world from both sides, / Man and beast in the round of their need…” and to state baldly, “My hoof and my hand clasped each other” is to grant us a glimpse into an existence beyond our immediate knowledge. Only with eyes “far more than human” can we imagine this moment at all. If a poet can do this, he can be said to have fulfilled the challenge Dickey poses for himself in his review of Smart’s “Song to David.” The magic of Dickey’s imagination affords us a revelation without compromising our sanity. He has connected us to unusual levels of perception and brought us back illuminated and unscarred.