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.