‘Do You Dance, Minnaloushe?’ Yeats’s Animal Questions

Abstract

In ‘The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow)’, Jacques Derrida recounts how each morning in the bathroom his cat looks at him, at his bare, exposed nudity.¹ This address of the animal, Derrida argues, has been suppressed throughout humanist thought: the discourses of philosophers ‘are sound and profound, but everything goes on as if they themselves had never been looked at, and especially not naked, by an animal’.² However, Derrida, in his reading of western literature, also outlines an alternative tradition of ‘thinking concerning the animal’, which ‘derives from poetry’.³ According to Derrida, ‘poets and prophets’ represent ‘those men and women who admit taking upon themselves the address of an animal’.⁴ The poetry of W. B. Yeats falls within this tradition of ‘thinking concerning the animal’, and many of Yeats’s poems take on the address of an animal. Yet, despite the development of ‘something like a bestiary’⁵ in Yeats’s poetry, scholars to date have not applied the insights of critical animal studies to his work. For Richard Ellmann, each of Yeats’s creatures ‘embodies some special sort of personality or mood’,⁶ an interpretation that suggests animals stand passively as the bearers of human meaning. However, there are also moments in Yeats’s poetry when animals break free of their confined roles and destabilize the epistemological categories that, conventionally, demarcate humans from other animals.