VULGAR ERRORS/ FERAL SUBJECTS #1: THE NAMES OF THE HARE

Hello everyone, and welcome to 'Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects', an informal poetry workshop with a particular focus on writing and writing through the abject animal other. The purpose of this blog is to share notes, links to relevant reading, video versions of our group discussions, and – when we’re all feeling a bit braver – some fabulous animal poems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbYlHFs3Y4E

The title of the series is taken from Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, also known simply as Vulgar Errors (1677). This is a work in which Browne seeks to challenge and refute the “vulgar” or common errors and superstitions of his age, including many relating to fabulous animal amalgams originating within bestiary texts. Browne's three determinants for obtaining truth were the authority of past scholarly works, the act of reason, and empirical experience. The title is a nod to the kinds of superstitions and myths that accrete around animal subjects, but also an invocation of those fabulous, abject, non-normative animal bodies.

This series has grown out of my own interest in the imaginative yoking of abject animality and otherness through the lens of the medieval bestiary, specifically the Cambridge University Library Bestiary, which is a twelfth century Latin bestiary text. My research at Cambridge is focused on bestiary texts as poems of irrational anxiety; the way in which they create moral allegories by animalising non-normative or racialised subjects, and classifying their bodies as perverse, amorphous, or sinful. Two pivotal figures in my own practice are that of the hyena and the wolf (more of them anon), and by writing about and through these figures, I am striving to articulate a queer feral poetics. These poems will form the basis of a book, provisionally titled The Dire Hyena's Knot, but through the workshops I am also hoping to provoke some writing, collaboration and performance surrounding the bestiary with anyone who might feel inspired by its hybrid inhabitants. We’ll see how that goes!

In the first session some key questions were: What or who is “feral”? What or who is “abject”? We also asked is feral could be a strategy, a tactic, or a mode of writing and resistance. What are some of the feral forms of poetry? What are some of the ways animals have been represented or used by/ in poetry, and how might a feral poetics speak back to these strategies of representation?

What makes an animal – or a person, for that matter – “feral” as opposed to merely wild? We discussed the idea that “feral” was a politically contingent and loaded category as well as purely definitional. We also talked about the way in which a “feral” animal – or person – might in some way transgress the limits of domesticity; might in some way regress, exceed or reject the status and identity of “tame”, might encroach upon or threaten the hygienic separation we believe we have instituted between ourselves and the wild.

That we struggle for a crisp, generic definition of the “feral” is in itself pretty telling. Perhaps we can agree, that “feral” is nature’s uncanny double? Or that it conjures the aspects of nature not easily defined or readily absorbed into existing imaginative binaries: self and other, wild versus tame. Feral exists, I think, as an unreliable receptacle even for otherness, operating between and across stable categories of being and belonging. Sue Donaldson coined a phrase and idea I find quite useful here: that of the ‘liminal animal’. That is an animal species that lives among humans but that is not subordinated to human controls or decorums. Such animals cannot be instrumentalised – as food or labour – and they can’t be imaginatively colonized, they’re not “cute”, they won’t lend themselves to Disneyfication, to being carted around as cultural freight, meaningful only in terms of the sensations and emotions they produce in the humans encountering them. These animals are opportunistic, synanthropic, scavenging. Because humans tend to put animals into one of only two categories— domesticated or wild—non-domesticated animals who live in often antagonistic or ambivalent proximity to humans are deemed out of place, figured as pests or as interlopers, as ciphers for contagion, incursion, swarm, or threat.

Historically, this idea of the too much or the out of place has been weaponized as a pejorative against vulnerable “others” – including but not limited to women, queers, the disabled, the mad, the racialized, those racialized by poverty such as the Irish, and GTR communities. In the treatment of these “others” feral comes to stand for those feelings, affects and embodiments that exceed normative frameworks of recognition and acceptance. Feral is the excessive idea of the animal, and this unease surrounding the feral has a really old, really established pedigree.

Within, for example, the medieval bestiary, bodies – demonic and animal, fabulous and abject – are, as Leah DeVun notes, ‘violative mixtures of human and animal, active and passive traits’ (DeVun, 2021). Images of nonbinary sex in particular are characterised by collapse and corruption; polarities become porous and permeable. otherness engulfs, subsumes, usurps, destroys. And DeVun writes that ‘nonbinary sex could be mobilized as a vicious tool to denigrate non-Christian and racially “othered” subjects’. Non-normative bodies were themselves objects of anxiety and repulsion, but they also functioned as expedient metaphors for presenting racialised others – Africans, Muslims, Jews, the Irish – as a subhuman threat, to be exiled to the cartographic limit of Christianity’s borders, or whose polluting presence was the proper subject of sanitary intervention and control. For example, the Physiologus – which, if you like, is the Grandaddy of all bestiary texts (so much more of this anon) – compares the hyena’s sexual ambiguity to the ‘ambiguity of faith’ exhibited by ‘the Jews, who were first faithful and afterwards idolatrous’, as well as to bad faith Christians, seduced to sensuality and greed (Edwards, 2007).

One way we can understand the feral is as nature uncannied, nature queered. ‘Queer’, like ‘feral’, is a mode of being imperfectly held within language, that cuts across and partakes of multiple categories of vexed belonging. Queer otherness is not a binary position, rather it collides or uneasily brackets all aspects of otherness, simultaneously both and neither, not split but mixed, hopelessly murky and adulterated. Feral doesn’t fit the dominant culture’s masturbatory fantasy of the body as a neutral and broadly behaving instrument. Feral encompasses forms, functions, and glitches ordinarily barred from the canon of classical aesthetics. Feral will not reconstitute its wayward bodies as productive workers, model citizens, or ideal consumer subjects. Feral is the suppressed, clandestine-grotesque body breaking out, ever-open and erupting. Feral is multiple and polyvalent, it challenges ‘the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable façade’ (Bakhtin, 1984) of the normative body, which I think is potentially radical, certainly disruptive, and poetically exciting.

But how does “feral” move from a category that is uneasily applied to certain subjects to a mode or manner of writing this subject can consciously deploy on page or in performance?  What does feral writing look and sound like?

We spoke about the way a feral poem might be embodied to a higher degree than non-feral texts, that the feral transformation of the speaker might produce changes to breath and voice, might generate fitful movement on the page – via the kinetics of the text – or stage. We spoke about the way in which “feral” might function as a form or permission in our creative practice, a suspension of the usual, habituated rules of “good” prosody and standard hegemonic English. We decided that “feral” poetry might speak in nonstandard ways, using vernacular, dialect, patois or cant. That feral might stutter or snarl, might be reduced to non-verbal sounds or gesture, which is both language and a failure of or substitute for language. Feral might make use of those forms of communication considered “improper”, “vulgar”, or “common”. Feral might take on the gutter punctuation and grammar of tabloids and trashy paperbacks, of cartoons, street corners, seedy pubs. Feral might use subaltern or suppressed languages, might collide them with standard English, classical allusions, “traditional” literary forms in ways that feel like trespass or incursion.

 

There followed a none-too-seamless segue into one of my favourite poems: the well-known Middle English poem, commonly known as ‘The Names of the Hare’, presented both in  their original medieval English and in more accessible Heaney translation. The original of the text is preserved in the venerable yet bizarrely securitised space of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It forms part of a trilingual miscellany, rubbing shoulders with bawdy fabliau, romances, devotional texts, and oddball prognostications. The catalogue summary rather joylessly describes it as ‘written by its owner’ with ‘amateurish scribal drawings and decoration.’ For some reason I have always bristled defensively over ‘amateurish’. The manuscript is said to date from the late thirteenth century, and to originate in or around the West Midlands. The poem’s full title, which is given in French, is ‘Names of the Hare in English’. It is composed of sixty-three lines and describes itself as the seventy-seven names you must say to a hare to avoid bad luck should you happen across one: ‘And mid wel goed devosioun/ He shall saien an oreisoun/ In the worshipe of the hare/ Thenne mai he wel fare.’ [And with good devotion/ he will say a prayer/ in worship of the hare/ then he may fare well. But why should you even need to say a prayer of protection after encountering a hare?

Good question!

If you look up the poem on the internet you will inevitably find a slew of new-age blogs describing it as a ‘magical charm’ against bad luck. Cute. But not massively accurate. It’s certainly true that the hare has enjoyed a rich and varied symbolic life: hares were sacred to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and there are numerous fragments of Greek ceramics featuring Eros either pursuing a hare in circles or holding a hare with varying degrees of tenderness. The hare was associated with Eoester, the Saxon goddess of Spring. And Boudicca, East Anglia’s famous warrior queen, was said to have released a hare before battle as a good luck charm. Pagan or pre-Christian Britain would seem to have held the hare in high esteem, but there also exists a troubling fund of lore from the medieval Christian world that treats the hare as an omen of ill fortune and grotesque transformation. Echoes of such lore persist today in bits and pieces of superstition: if a hare crosses a sailor’s path on his way to his ship, he should turn for home or risk being drowned; a running hare presages a fire; if a pregnant woman sees a hare, her child will be born with a ‘hare lip’.

 

Hares have been a central staple of witch belief for centuries. Here is a snippet from the “confession” of Isobel Gowdie, executed for witchcraft in 1662:

I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sych and meickle care;
And I shall go in the Devil's name,
Ay while I come home again.

Hare, hare, God send thee care.
I am in a hare's likeness now,
But I shall be in a woman's likeness even now.

Therianthropy – the magical metamorphosis of human beings into animals – is one of our oldest folk beliefs. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici writes about the belief in magic in early European societies as a massive stumbling block to the rationalisation of the work process. Magic functioned as a kind of refusal of work, a form of insubordination and grass-roots resistance. Women’s claim to magical power in particular undermined state authority because it gave the poor and powerless hope that they could manipulate and control the natural environment, and by extension subvert the social order. Magic must, therefore, be demonised and persecuted out of existence for the coercive projects of church and state to be realised. If magic is a form of disruption or subversion to this social order, then the idea of therianthropy must have particular potency for poor or indigent women, who lived out their lives in the extremis of vulnerability, without protection, redress or escape from a world in which they had no say; in which they were afforded the rights of neither citizens nor subjects, in which they were functionally and legally animals, but animals of a very particular kind: beasts of burden, their bodies harnessed without consultation or apology as sources of sexual, reproductive, and domestic labour. An act of volitional transformation, of embodied fugitivity and flight would have held an intense attraction, a means of imaginative escape.

Back to the poem: in the always amusing Historia Animalium Aristotle suggests that a hare can get pregnant twice, that they breed and bear ‘at all seasons’ and can even conceive during pregnancy. This sounds bizarre, and Aristotle has form in getting matters of biology spectacularly and hilariously wrong, but in this instance he is actually correct: a hare can get pregnant when already pregnant. This biological peculiarity has led to hare parts being used as both contraceptives and—conversely—as a cure for cramps during pregnancy. It may also be the basis for a lurid piece of misinformation recorded in our friend the Physiologus, that, a man who ate hare meat would become ‘a boy-molester’ because ‘the hare grows a new anal opening each year, so that however many years he has lived, he has that many anuses.’ The hare was also believed to be hermaphrodite, switching at will between male and female forms. For this reason the hare was used during antiquity as a way to express homosexual desire.

Our take away here is that the hare was— and is — a complex figure in folklore: often the embodiment of abject carnality and threatening reproductive power. The hare can reproduce without a mate, it has this prodigious and unnatural fecundity; it is Janus-faced and shapeshifting, fluctuant and other. Queer.

Here’s a great version of the poem, which I think captures something of its uncanniness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGIcksqNMNU&t=21s

I think the reading brings out something that Middle English scholars have long debated, which is how seriously or how literally ‘The Names of the Hare’ should be interpreted. Is the poem intended as a burlesque of superstition? Or is it a genuine prayer against misfortune? As with the hare itself, maybe the answer is both. Or maybe the answer is somewhere in between. Take these lines from the beginning of the poem: ‘Bot if he lei down on londe/ That he bereth in his 1ateg/ (Be hit staf, be hit bouwe),/ And blesce  him with his helbowe.’ [But if he places on the ground/ whatever he carries in his hand/ (be it staff or bow)/ and blesses himself with his elbow]. Consider the glorious absurdity, the slapstick physical comedy, of laying down whatever it is you’re carrying and blessing yourself with your elbow. I mean, for one thing is the hare just meant to sit there while you’re doing that? Further, the seventy-seven names both exceed and fail the poem’s stated aims of either describing the hare or warding off the bad luck attendant upon meeting one. The litany runs from the obvious to the frankly whimsical, including many hapax legomena – or names unique to the text – which repeatedly signal both the importance and strangeness of the hare. Finally, the poem refers to the hare as ‘The der that alle men scornes/ The der that no-mon ne-dar nemmen’. [The animal that all men scorn, and that no man dares to name]. This feels like an odd summary for a poem that just went to excessive lengths naming and renaming that very animal. One way of making sense of this is certainly as kind of parody on superstitious charms. But I always wonder if something else is being signaled here? An anxiety about otherness, and about language itself? Perhaps about our need to locate particular kinds of human domination within and through language? To put it another way: is the need to name the hare part of a contest of mastery? The unknown speaker attempts to categorise and know the animal other, to absorb it into his system of signs and understanding, to ultimately control its perverse, amorphous nature and form.

This control was a profound obsession during the Middle Ages, and it’s this notion of control that gave rise to the literary genre of the bestiary. So the medieval bestiary was spawned really by the Physiologus, a second – possibly third – century Greek text, and a moralizing riff on Aristotle’s more matter-of-fact, yet still wildly off-beam, natural history. Both sets of text were oriented towards the accumulation of knowledge about the natural world, but Aristotle’s imitators seemed driven by the need to situate that knowledge within the compass of a Christian metaphysics. One of Adam’s original perfections was an encyclopaedic knowledge of nature. This knowledge was lost at the Fall, and the bestiary texts often feel like wee sweaty attempts to recuperate that kind of unattainable mastery (Harrison, 1999). The animal fixed in language and in form. As Christopher de Hamel notes ‘The domination which God gave people over all living creatures is implicit throughout all bestiaries. Names and their etymology are very important parts of [bestiary texts]. It is a well-known psychological concept that to give a name to something is a way of controlling it.’ (de Hamel, 2008).

Moving on, what else can we notice about the poem? Well, metrically, the poem is an unpredictable escapist. In her essay on medieval animots Carolynn van Dyke observes that the poem’s ‘strong but varied rhythms suit the movements of an alternately wind-swift, lurking, scuttling, leaping ground-sitter’. The poem, she suggests, performs the hare: it follows patterns, but never just one at any given time. It shifts shape and guise just like the animal it seeks to represent or inscribe. I would also suggest that the reverse is true, just as the poem performs the hare, so too is the hare a figure for language itself, in its flights and leaps and swerves, in its many twists and turns. Language simultaneously binds and expresses; it is a nexus for many kinds of power—it represents the authority of the law, it appeals to otherworldly intercession in the form of prayer or hex. ‘The Names of the Hare’ was written at a time when the English language was still in the process of being codified. How appropriate that a miscellany written in three languages contains a poem dealing with the capacities and failures of English to name and to know. What I love about ‘The Names of the Hare’ is that the poem presents the hare as an animal quite capable of escaping and breaking loose.

Strange to relate – and something else to think about – there is straight up a genre of manuscript marginalia that’s become known as ‘the rabbit’s revenge’. These pictures feature— I kid you not—medieval bunnies stringing up or striking terror into the hearts of those who try to capture them (think The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog from Monty Python and The Holy Grail). For persons in the Middle Ages the ‘natural order’ was stringently delineated, so that any inversion of that rule provoked both humour and unease. Human beings were at the top of the heap with wealthy human beings just below God, and peasants just above animals. What both the poem and the rabbit’s revenge marginalia belie is an insecurity about humanness itself, how this is categorized and constituted.

Whenever I think about ‘the rabbit’s revenge’ I am reminded of Bugs Bunny: his tricks, sleights, and schemes played out against the hapless hunter Elmer Fudd. Specifically, I think about Bugs’ cross-dressing: how he transgresses both binary gender roles and species divide to expose the performative nature of gender, the tenuous category of humanness, and to manipulate heterosexist desire towards his own ends. Bugs is already monstrous, a man-sized talking rabbit fit for a medieval bestiary, but he is doubly monstrous—and is supposed to be doubly hilarious—for the ways in which he inverts the ‘natural’ heteronormative order. I have always been curious about how bound up this is with language. Bugs flips the assumptions about relative degrees of sentience and agency that are embedded within language and grammar. While Fudd mumbles, stutters and whispers, Bugs speech is a bravura performance of wise-cracking and insouciant wit. He revels in verbal parries, puns, and jokes of which the less fluent Fudd is most often the brunt. Bugs Bunny is a quick-change artist. He needs to be, in order to survive. The hare in ‘The Names of the Hare’ is a quick-change artist too; it is beyond language’s capacity to restrain or to absorb the living hare in all of its restless fugivity. The speaker is trying to get at the hare, to pin it down, to fix it in space and time, but the poem itself demonstrates that this might be beyond the capacity of mere words. Ultimate victory will be granted, we read, by eating the animal other, and not—contrary to the poem’s stated promise— by naming it: ‘That thou come to me ded,/ Other in cive, other in bred! Amen!’ [That you should come to me dead/ whether in chive sauce, whether in bread! Amen!] It’s an ominous sentiment, but a familiar one, an undersong of doom beneath the mad-cap frivolity, where the hunter determines to kill what he cannot control.

And that felt like a suitable place to leave the session. We left with the idea that we would return in our next session with poems delving into our own animal superstitions. We might think about how meter, punctuation and line-breaks can be used to inscribe something of the animal’s movement or character within the poem. We might also consider where the superstition came from, and what it tells us about our human insecurities and anxieties. I leave you with Donna Haraway writing in A Cyborg Manifesto: ‘grammar is politics by other means,’ and effective politics require speaking in the language of domination (Haraway, 1985).

 

Delve a Little Deeper?

Here are some interesting and provocative ideas pertaining to the “feral” that underpin our discussions and provide interesting diversionary research rabbit-holes (pun intended)!

 

* Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, (Oxford University Press, 2011), p.211.

“The invisibility of liminal animals does not just lead to indifference or neglect. Much worse, it often leads to a de-legitimization of their very presence. Since we assume that wild animals should live out in the wilderness, liminal animals are often stigmatized as aliens or invaders who wrongly trespass on human territory, and who have no right to be there. And as a result, whenever conflicts arise with humans, we feel entitled to get rid of them, either by mass trapping/relocation or even through mass extermination campaigns (shooting, poisoning). Since they do not belong in our space, we feel entitled to eliminate these so-called pests in the animal equivalent of ethnic cleansing. 2 The situation of liminal animals is, therefore, a highly paradoxical one. From a broad evolutionary perspective, they have been amongst the most successful of animal species, finding new ways to survive and thrive in a human-dominated world. But from a legal and moral perspective, they are amongst the least recognized or protected animals.”

 

* DeVun, Leah, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance, (West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2021), p.91-93.

“These demonic bodies were violative mixtures of human and animal, active and passive, traits. Their unseemly mixtures made visible their uncleanness—and, indeed, medieval writers often referred to demons as “unclean spirits”. […] Christian authors routinely compared Jews to demons, or portrayed Jews as in league with demonic forces. Some images linked Jews explicitly to both demons and nonbinary sex. Guillaume le Clerc’s Anglo-Norman Bestiaire, roughly contemporary with the Aberdeen Bestiary, rehearses what are by now familiar accusations: Jews were denounced in the text as sexually and spiritually inconstant and duplicitous; they were said to serve two masters but satisfied neither.”

 

* Edwards, Karen: ‘Milton’s  Reformed  Animals: An  Early  Modern  Bestiary H-K, HYENA’, (Milton Quarterly, 41, 2007) p.115-119:

“The fact that  the  external  genitalia  of  male  and  female  spotted  hyenas  are almost  identical  may  be  responsible  for  the  most  persistent  and  infamous “fact” about  the  hyena—that  it  changes  its  sex  yearly  or  biennially […] The Physiologus likens its sexual ambiguity to the “ambiguity of faith” exhibited by “the Jews, who  were  first  faithful  and  afterwards  idolatrous” and  by  “members  of  the  Christian  community, who  are  devoted  to  sensuality  and  greed”.”

 

* Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve: Tendencies, (Duke University Press, 1993), p.8.

“ […] what's striking is the number and difference of the dimensions that "sexual identity" is supposed to organize into a seamless and univocal whole.

And if it doesn't?

That's one of the things that "queer" can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures attaching to the very many of us who may at times be moved to describe ourselves as (among many other possibilities) pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or ... people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such.”

 

* Halberstam, Jack, ‘Go Gaga: Anarchy, Chaos, and the Wild” Social Text 31, no. 3, 2013), p. 123-134. See also Halberstam, Jack, The Queer Art of Failure, (Duke University Press, 2011).

“It [ ‘wild’] is a tricky word to use but it is a concept that we cannot live without if we are to combat the conventional modes of rule that have synced social norms to economic practices and have created a world order where every form of disturbance is quickly folded back into quiet, where every ripple is quickly smoothed over, where every instance of eruption has been tamped down and turned into new evidence of the rightness of the status quo.”

 

* Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 320.

“[the classical form is] an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual. That which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off [...] is eliminated, hidden or moderated. All orifices of the body are closed. The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable façade. […] All attributes of the unfinished world are carefully removed, as well as all signs of its inner life.”

 

* Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (Routledge, 2012) p.8.

“The classical body is transcendental and monumental, closed, static, self-contained, symmetrical and sleek; it is identified with high or official culture [...] with the rationalism, individualism, and the normalizing aspirations of the bourgeoisie. The grotesque body is open, protruding, irregular, secreting, and changing.”

 

* Bataille Georges, ‘Abjection and Miserable Forms’, More and Less, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Yvonne Shafir (1934; MIT Press, 1993), p.9.

“In the final analysis, oppressors must be reduced to sovereignty in its individual form: on the contrary, the oppressed are formed out of the amorphous and immense mass of the wretched population.”

 

* Savoy, Eric. ‘The Signifying Rabbit.’ (Narrative, vol. 3, no. 2, 1995), p.191.

“Bugs Bunny parodies “woman” in order to insert himself into Elmer Fudd's heterosexual fantasies and heterosexist compulsions; in order to sabotage this script he offers duplicitous signs of femininity, signs which are patently transparent and constructed to us, but entirely opaque to Elmer's gendered (il)logic.”

 

* Creed, Barbara, ‘Lesbian Bodies: Tribades, tomboys and tarts’ in Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, ed by Elizabeth Grosz, and Elspeth Probyn (Taylor & Francis Group, 1995), p.97.

“Those who ate the meat of the hyena would, like the hyena, change their gender from male to female every year. So women could develop male sexual organs and vice versa. Those who ate the weasel would become like those women who engage in oral sex and who conceive and give birth orally. The abject practices of the hare, weasel and hyena were associated with homosexual practices, abnormal birth and sex changes. In this context, homosexual acts were seen as unclean and animalistic. Desire transforms the body; abject desire makes the body abject. This belief is similar to the view that women gave birth to monsters because of the kinds of desires they experienced during pregnancy. […] Desire can also affect the sexual organs.”

 You might also want to check out:

van Dyke, Carolynn, ‘Names of the Beasts: Tracking the Animot in Medieval Texts’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 34 (2012).

Federici, Silvia, Caliban and the Witch (Autonomedia, 2004).

Haraway, Donna, When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

And here are the texts of the poems!

 

Les nouns de un levre en Englais

 

The mon that the hare i-met
Ne shal him nevere be the bet,
Bot if he lei down on londe
That he bereth in his honde.
(Be hit staf, be hit bouwe),
And blesce him with his helbowe.
And mid wel goed devosioun
He shall saien on oreisoun
In the worshipe of the hare
Thenne mai he wel fare.

"The hare, the scotart,
The bigge, the bouchart,
The scotewine, the skikart,
The turpin, the tirart,
The wei-betere, the ballart,
The go-bi-dich, the soillart,
The wimount, the babbart,
The stele-awai, the momelart,
The evil-i-met, the babbart,
The scot, the deubert,
The gras-bitere, the goibert,
The late-at-hom, the swikebert,
The frendlese, the wodecat,
The brodlokere, the bromcat,
The purblinde, the fursecat,
The louting, the westlokere,
The waldenlie, the sid-lokere,
And eke the roulekere;
The stobhert, the long-here,
The strau-der, the lekere,
The wilde der, the lepere,
The shorte der, the lorkere,
The wint-swift, the sculkere,
The hare serd, the heg-roukere,
The deudinge, the deu-hoppere,
The sittere, the gras-hoppere,
The fitelfot, the foldsittere,
The cawel-hert, the wortcroppere,
The go-bi-ground, the sitte-stille,
The pintail, toure-tohulle;
The cove-arise,
The make-agrise,
The wite-wombe,
The go-mit-lombe,
The choumbe, the chaulart,
The chiche, the couart,
The make-fare, the breke-forwart,
The fnattart, the pollart,
(His hei nome is srewart);
The hert with the letherene hornes,
The der that woneth in the cornes,
The der that alle men scornes,
The der that no-mon ne-dar nemmen."

When thou havest al this i-said,
Thenne is the hare migtt alaid.
Thenne migtt thou wenden forth,
Est and west, and south and north,
Wedrewardes so mon wile,
The man that con ani skile.
Have nou godne dai, sire hare!
God the lete so wel fare,
That thou come to me ded,
Other in cive, other in bred! Amen!

 

— MS Digby 86f 168 v. (1272–1283)

 

 

The Names of the Hare

 

The man the hare has met
will never be the better of it
except he lay down on the land
what he carries in his hand—
be it staff or be it bow—
and bless him with his elbow
and come out with this litany
with devotion and sincerity
to speak the praises of the hare.
Then the man will better fare.

'The hare, call him scotart,
big-fellow, bouchart,
the O'Hare, the jumper,
the rascal, the racer.

Beat-the-pad, white-face,
funk-the-ditch, shit-ass.

The wimount, the messer,
the skidaddler, the nibbler,
the ill-met, the slabber.

The quick-scut, the dew-flirt,
the grass-biter, the goibert,
the home-late, the do-the-dirt.

The starer, the wood-cat,
the purblind, the furze cat,
the skulker, the bleary-eyed,
the wall-eyed, the glance-aside
and also the hedge-springer.

The stubble-stag, the long lugs,
the stook-deer, the frisky legs,
the wild one, the skipper,
the hug-the-ground, the lurker,
the race-the-wind, the skiver,
the shag-the-hare, the hedge-squatter,
the dew-hammer, the dew-hoppper,
the sit-tight, the grass-bounder,
the jig-foot, the earth-sitter,
the light-foot, the fern-sitter,
the kail-stag, the herb-cropper.

The creep-along, the sitter-still,
the pintail, the ring-the-hill,
the sudden start,
the shake-the-heart,
the belly-white,
the lambs-in-flight.

The gobshite, the gum-sucker,
the scare-the-man, the faith-breaker,
the snuff-the-ground, the baldy skull,
(his chief name is scoundrel.)

The stag sprouting a suede horn,
the creature living in the corn,
the creature bearing all men's scorn,
the creature no one dares to name.'

When you have got all this said
then the hare's strength has been laid.
Then you might go faring forth—
east and west and south and north,
wherever you incline to go—
but only if you're skilful too.
And now, Sir Hare, good-day to you.
God guide you to a how-d'ye-do
with me: come to me dead
in either onion broth or bread.

 

The Rattle Bag, ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), pp. 305-306.