Recently a friend of mine — a poet of great enthusiasms and strong opinions — was touting James Dickey’s “The Sheep Child” to the skies. For him, it represents the single great achievement of Dickey’s career, eclipsing all his other writings to stand alone as an example of what a poet can do — but almost never does — if he is lucky enough, and the stars align, and the moment of poetic magic has finally arrived after a lifetime of dutiful obeisance to the Muse. In a review of Christopher Smart’s “A Song to David,” at the end of his volume of criticism, Babel to Byzantium (1968), Dickey has written of that lightning stroke of creative energy which all poets wait for, and hope for, if they have nerve and talent enough to receive it:

How shall we deal with the mad in their perfect disguises? From the beginning we have suspected them of magic and have wanted what they have, the revelations. But how may we come by these and still retain our own sanity? What must we do in order to connect safely with the insane at their clairvoyant and dangerous levels?

He then speaks of going into such poems “clutching sanity like an amulet,” and though “The Sheep Child” does not represent the visions of someone insane, it does reach for a revelation beyond the bounds of ordinary human experience. To penetrate and understand the life of animals — without losing his own humanity — is an ambition Dickey devoted much of his life towards realizing. “The Sheep Child” is an attempt to reach that understanding, to see “for a blazing moment / The great grassy world form both sides.” And then, like Ishmael, to come back psychically undamaged to tell the rest of us all about it.

Poets, though, love a challenge whether it is formal or thematic, and for poets like Dickey the opportunity to write about a half-sheep / half-human child must have been irresistible.

In one of his more notable poems from A Coney Island of the Mind (1968), poet and co-founder of City Lights Bookstore Lawrence Ferlinghetti presents us with a memorable image of the artist as a tightrope walker, “constantly risking absurdity and death” as he performs above the faces of the adoring crowd. Even the slightest misstep here or there will send him hurtling into “empty air.” For poets who are also “super realists,” this is a perpetual danger. The riskier the subject and proposition a poem undertakes, the harder it is to pull off and the more likely it will end in disaster. Poets, though, love a challenge whether it is formal or thematic, and for poets like Dickey the opportunity to write about a half-sheep / half-human child must have been irresistible. To succeed practically assures critical acclaim and, following that, the grateful and widespread response of readers.

“The Sheep Child” is inarguably one of Dickey’s best poems. It is certainly his oddest, and anthologized and written about admiringly over the last fifty years or so. If I ask myself why — why has it been singled out as one of Dickey’s best — I cannot answer that it is more powerfully imagined or more well-written than much of his other work. Anyone assessing Dickey’s work might include “The Heaven of Animals,” “The Lifeguard,” “Cherrylog Road,” “The Scarred Girl,” “The Performance,” “Drowning with Others,” “Buckdancer’s Choice,” “In the Tree House at Night,” “A Birth,” “The Hospital Window,” and perhaps “The Summons” among his best work. “What, then? What qualities does “The Sheep Child” possess that has garnered such attention and gained the loyalty of so many readers, including my friend? In many ways, it is typical of Dickey’s general style, exhibiting the same traits as his work as a whole: extraordinary diction, startling imagery, an hallucinatory rhythm devised to mesmerize the reader, along with an imaginative premise that leads to what some critics have described as southern Gothic.

I suspect the poem has become famous as a result of its odd implications. It surely ranks as one of Dickey’s quirkiest, proceeding from a premise that attempts to convince the reader to suspend disbelief as it walks the line between real tragedy and sheer preposterousness. No matter how many times I encounter this poem, I have a hard time suppressing a smirk each time I read “The boys have taken their own true wives in the city…The sheep are safe in the west hill pasture.” These assertions, especially the latter, might serve as the punch line for an unseemly joke. I can easily imagine someone reading them as ludicrously perverse, and laughing out loud.

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.

But Dickey isn’t done. The beginning of the last stanza is a marvel of revelatory imagery, touching yet another stratum of awareness that is weirdly compelling:

From dark grass I came straight

To my father’s house, whose dust
Whirls up in the halls for no reason
When no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner
And, through my immortal waters
I meet the sun’s grains eye
To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.

We have reached the apex of the poem’s imaginative and emotional arc. I find these lines stunning in their particularity, their directness, their ability to dislocate us so we see the human world from an almost hallucinatory angle. This passage has just the right mixture of ordinariness and eeriness to convince us of the sheep child’s uncanny predicament. The child’s loneliness, the horror of his preservation in a jar, the suspension of time even towards immortality, the closeness yet unreachability of the human world — his father’s world — are graphically depicted in language that is accessible to anyone. Dickey once described his ambition to write about extraordinary things in the most ordinary language (and not the other way around, which he suspects is the case with too many poets). He succeeds here, admirably. And though the language is simple, it is subtle too. Dickey finds, as he often does, the perfect combination of words to express complex emotional contradictions — “a hellish mild corner” — and resonant phrases — “immortal waters” — as well as unpredictable nouns that feel so perfect one can’t imagine they could be expressed any better—“my closet of glass.” Even the word “fail” seems to me to have suggestive undertones.

The power of his imagination attempts to place us back in a primal state, a mythological world, in which everything is conscious and alive.

Dickey has told us that the sheep child “died staring.” We know, then, that the creature’s eyes are open in his glass container and Dickey allows us to see what he sees, cloistered away as he is in the back of an unvisited museum. But those eyes trouble the reader with the frankness of their gaze: is it accusatory? Forgiving? Longing? Angry? Vindictive? What would we feel if we could stand before the sheep child alone one day on the back shelves of the museum to which he has been relegated it seems for eternity?

From here the poem descends towards its conclusion, which has already been stated in a different way at the beginning. Once more Dickey swerves towards the comic: “I am he who drives them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf and from the chaste ewe in the wind.” It is difficult for me to imagine ewes as chaste, and when he hints at masturbation, “they go deep into their known right hands,” I have to repress a smile. Still, the poem negotiates these dangers, despite itself, and emerges as a kind of profound meditation on non-human or half-human existence. I find it hard, as well, to lay aside my doubts with regard to the poem’s chief premise: human sperm cannot impregnate a sheep’s egg, so such a “child” could never actually exist; and I do not believe human beings only choose their own kind to mate with in order to avoid creating such monsters in the first place. We are not bestial by nature, and have to be forced to be civilized by virtue of taboos.

In poem after poem, he asks his readers to accept the implausible… The miraculous is common ground for Dickey.

“The Sheep Child” is perhaps an extreme example of Dickey’s method, but not by much. In poem after poem, he asks his readers to accept the implausible: a man walks on the surface of a lake; another man drives a jeep at the bottom of the sea; a soldier drinks water out of a dead soldier’s helmet and begins to experience the dead soldier’s memories. The miraculous is common ground for Dickey. He takes seriously those daydreams all of us have at one time or another, and which we recognize as sheer whimsy. For example, we may fantasize that a particular tree is conscious and trying to communicate with us. Most of us brush such thoughts aside almost as soon as we have them, but Dickey sees in them the subject matter and premise for a poem. “What if,” he seems to suggest. “What if I accept this as true, what then?” His poems work out the implications of such strange ideas in order to restore to the world some of its original mystery. The power of his imagination attempts to place us back in a primal state, a mythological world, in which everything is conscious and alive.

Dickey believed in the power of Imagination so much (with the Romantic’s capital “I”) that he thought — through poetry — he might actually alter reality. This is the impetus behind his poem, “A Birth,” in which he imagines a horse in a field which then steps out of the poem to become a real horse in a real field, alive and breathing. Of course, this isn’t true, but Dickey is trying to will it to be true. To make contact with the occult, the metaphysical, is his true ambition. His poems are attempts to record those efforts, to invest his writing with the numinous so that the reader will feel the hair stand up on the back of his neck. This is the holy dread the ancients claimed to feel in the presence of the supernatural, and points back towards the revelations of the insane and their dangerous clairvoyance. Dickey is not a religious poet, like Herbert or Hopkins, but he is shamanistic in his approach to nature. In this, he is related to D. H. Lawrence and Robinson Jeffers whose forays into pantheism imbue their poetry with the same aura of transcendence: how to get beyond ourselves and look back at the human world with otherworldly eyes, the way the sheep child views his “father’s house” from inside the eternity of his immortal waters.

At the beginning of his career, Dickey was able to do this seemingly at will. His first four or five books are filled with a poetic magic that few others in America at that time were able to manage. These books include Into the Stone (1960), Drowning with Others (1962), Helmets (1964), Buckdancer’s Choice (1965), and perhaps Falling, May Day Sermon, and Other Poems (1981) (though as far as I know the last of these was never a separate book but a scattering of poems written about the same time as the first four books and gathered together in The Whole Motion: Collected Poems (1992) from Wesleyan University Press). “May Day Sermon,” while it contains some powerful passages and local brilliancies is essentially a failure, while his other long poem, “Falling,” succeeds — possibly because it is a narrative and presents us with a central event that helps to hold the poem together as it unfolds. Whenever Dickey self-consciously gathers himself up to become The Bard, as in another long poem, “Dover: Believing in Kings” and even “The Owl King,” his ability to sustain the power of his art flags. He seems to be able to summon the best of himself and concentrate his mind only in brief moments of lucidity. The shorter poems in his earlier books, even before they are completely understood, sear themselves into the mind. Dickey needs the tautness and precision of these lines in order to hold his Imagination in check. When he doesn’t, as in “May Day Sermon,” the wildness gets away from him and he whirls images out of himself hoping they might cohere into something fantastic.

Too often, they don’t.

By the time he reached The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970), his poetry had become distinctly self-parodic and willful. Even the title of the book above attests to the over-the-top, frenetic style he eventually cultivated. “The Eye-Beaters,” “May Day Sermon,” “The Zodiac,” “Exchanges” and even the shorter poems in his later books read more like fever dreams than poetry. By codifying the elements of his style and writing poems out of a rigid formula, albeit his own, he diluted his work. I attribute this falling off to three things: the self-consciousness that eventually marked his work; the fact that he began writing novels shortly after finishing his earlier work in poetry; and his abandonment of the anapestic meter he had carefully developed in order to give his poems the spellbinding, incantatory power he initially sought. Once he let go of this, his poems began to scatter themselves around the page and lose the tension they once had. The phrases become more abstract and condensed. Concrete imagery gives way to thought, all of which might be seen by comparing the following examples. First, from “The Movement of Fish,” in Drowning with Others, in which Dickey is closely and painstakingly observing the behavior of water:

There is a clarity here, and a rigorous focus that does not allow for excess. Dickey’s imagination is fully engaged and concentrated on what he is seeing — even in his mind’s eye. Language and form do not obscure his subject. In “Falling,” he describes moonlight on a lake as “scaled roaming silver” and the reflection of the moon itself “packed and coiled in a reservoir,” images of uncanny lyrical exactness.

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.