`Few or No Bluish Animals'

Except for the obvious primate infestation, mammals are sparse in our neighborhood. We have cats, dogs, squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits, and some fool probably keeps a ferret. Joining their company recently was Rattus rattus, the common roof rat or black rat, though the one I saw was pale gray shading to brown, and nowhere near the roof. I rounded the corner behind the house and there he was, on the ground near the tall plastic bins holding trash, yard waste and recyclables. He stopped, stood rather formally on his hind legs like Stuart Little, studied me a moment and disappeared beneath the magnolia. His appearance was homely and harmless like a stuffed animal, and I felt no revulsion.

As a rule, mammals are a drab bunch. No scarlet tanagers, poison dart frogs or red admirals (“red admirables,” to Nabokov) among them. Thoreau in his journal for Feb. 21, 1855, observes, four years before the publication of On the Origin of Species:

“How plain, wholesome, and earthy are the colors of quadrupeds generally! The commonest I should say is the tawny or various shades of brown, answering to the russet which is the prevailing color of the earth’s surface, perhaps, and to the yellow of sands beneath. The darker brown mingled with this answers to the darker-colored soil of the surface. The white of the polar bear, ermine weasel, etc., answers to the snow; the spots of the pards, perchance, to the earth spotted with flowers or tinted leaves of autumn; the black, perhaps, to night, and muddy bottoms and dark waters. There are few or no bluish animals.”

In fact, blue is not uncommon among fish, birds, amphibians, butterflies and other insects, though rare at Thoreau’s northern latitude. I like his use of “answers,” a verb that partakes of Transcendentalism and Darwin. Her biographer, Elizabeth Frank, says Louise Bogan based one of her poems, “Variation on a Sentence,” on this journal entry by Thoreau, in 1936:

“Of white and tawny, black as ink,
Yellow, and undefined, and pink,
And piebald, there are droves I think.

“(Buff kine in herd, gray whales in pod,
Brown woodchucks, colored like the sod,
All creatures from the hand of God.)

“And many of a hellish hue;
But, for some reason hard to view,
Earth’s bluish animals are few.”

Am I alone in finding “bluish,” so close to “blush,” a funny word? Bogan’s final poetry collection was titled The Blue Estuaries (1968). Frank writes of Bogan:

“For years she had found pleasure and solace in Thoreau’s prose and observations. Passages in which Thoreau charted heat and cold, shadows and tints, patterns and configuration, sounds and rhythms found their way into her notebooks. The infinite variation of his firm, flexible sentences, his rich, yet common English vocabulary, all seemed endlessly inventive and alive to her. And the man’s life – his loneliness and ecstasies – moved her, sometimes, to tears. She found joy in simply copying his words down, writing once next to a cluster of transcription: `spent a whole Sunday afternoon transcribing these extracts. The sound of the sea: alternate cloud & light. Peace. Happiness.’”