A much later poem about the same element, “Remnant Water,” from The Strength of Fields (1979), exposes the self-conscious failures of this style:

In this poem, Dickey seems to be observing a dead carp in what is left of a dried-up lake. And in his usual fashion, he becomes the fish and muses about what this kind of death would be like, a “blank judgment given only / In ruination’s suck-holing acre…” Rather than creating mystery by means of clearly observing mysterious events, Dickey tries to create mystery by obscuring his subject. This is always a mistake in poetry. Mystery and obscurity are two very different things. The many compound phrases, the scattering of lines, the gaps and white spaces, the partial imagery and fractured grammar do not convince us that something profound is happening. Like a bad magician, Dickey is trying to divert our attention by intoning a kind of mumbo-jumbo spell, hoping by doing so that he will summon mystery into the poem. It does not work. Mystery is something we can clearly see, but do not understand. Not something hidden from us by a scrim of words.

We can follow him into other realms of consciousness, and other bodies, because he has left us a poetry full of moments of startling originality and insight. Once we have seen the sheep child, we can never forget him.

A diminution of power among poets whose early work exhibited moments of great insight and technical skill is nothing new. The visionary poet is not granted his or her powers forever. Wordsworth and Shelly mourn the loss of vision bestowed on their younger selves in “Intimations of Immortality” and “A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” The older Dylan Thomas tries something similar to Dickey, by self-consciously slinging words at us in an attempt to conjure up his former brilliance. Rimbaud simply walks away from poetry altogether, knowing perhaps that his greatest work was behind him. This is the tragedy facing the vatic poet. Imagination, like the body’s youthful strength and elasticity, attains and loses its capabilities and cannot be restored. Other poets, like Yeats, grow stronger over a lifetime of writing. But they do not start from the eminence of the true seer and try to maintain that level of genius. They begin as estimable poets and rise to the level of seers with age. Why and how imagination strengthens or diminishes is a subject for psychologists and neuroscientists. From the poet’s standpoint, such phenomena are evidenced in their work.

In his enthusiastic response to “The Sheep Child,” my friend felt that at last Dickey had been able to escape from himself and enter the life of another. This may be somewhat true. For me, though, Dickey does an equally good job of escaping himself and getting “out of his own skin,” in poems like “A Dog Sleeping on My Feet,” “The Dusk of Horses,” “Listening to Fox Hounds,” and “Reincarnation I and II” (among others) without risking the potential comedy of “The Sheep Child.” The “wooly baby” speaks distinctly in Dickey’s voice, and no other. I don’t think, in any of his poems, he is ever anyone but himself, even when he’s a snake or a dog or a migrating seabird. It’s all Dickey, gloriously imagining himself becoming something else. We can follow him into other realms of consciousness, and other bodies, because he has left us a poetry full of moments of startling originality and insight. Once we have seen the sheep child, we can never forget him.