Giraffes and what they do not do

I like reading Terry Eagleton. His turns of phrase, his asides, are like those of a kindly, ironical and ever-so-slightly embittered uncle, the kind of wit to which I fervidly aspired when I was an undergraduate but never had the power or the indulgent audience to achieve.

It is just possible that Porphyria’s lover is a woman, in the sense that you can adopt this hypothesis and still make sense of the work; but nobody would suggest that the lover is a giraffe. This is not just because Victorian writers did not generally go in for poems about bestiality, but because the textual evidence simply would not support it. Giraffes do not wind people’s hair three times around their throat and then strangle them. Their hearts do not swell at the thought that they are worshipped by a woman. Nor do they entertain thoughts about God, aesthetic or otherwise. If someone asked us how we know that giraffes do not spend their time feverishly brooding on metaphysical questions, it would be enough to reply: by looking at what they do. We do not have to get inside their brains to be reasonably sure of this, just as I do not have to get inside your brain to know that when I see you rolling at my feet with your hair on fire emitting strange noises, you are clearly not happy. (How to Read a Poem, p. 105)

In many ways, I think these rhetorical tricks and japes are not to be trusted, since the final appeal here is to something like common sense, that collective hallucination that social scientists spend the better part of their time trying to pick apart. Poets and critics, on the other hand, dwell within the common sense of their times, and Eagleton’s riposte is certainly effective enough to placate that truculent student who wants the lecturer to prove–prove–that a giraffe cannot be a metaphysician-strangler in Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”.

Tagged as: poetry, rhetoric, Terry Eagleton