Abstract

This study delves into how nonhuman species in Elizabeth Bishop’s poems create a world through entanglement and symbiosis among multiple species, exerting their inexhaustible agencies even as their lives and habitats face disruptions from unpredictable encounters with human species, leading to their precarity and indeterminacy. In “The Moose,” “The Armadillo,” “The Fish,” and “At the Fishhouses,” animals are portrayed as subjects whose homes are encroached upon or whose lives are endangered by human activities. Climate change, fueled by colonialism and industrial capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of animals, plants, and the marginalized populations of colonized nations. In Bishop’s poems, animals symbolize not only nonhuman subjects disturbed by climate crisis but also the human minorities burdened with climate injustice. Despite their challenges, these nonhumans are not merely passive victims; they are dignified subjects who actively exert their agency through interactions with humans, thereby influencing and transforming human perspectives and behaviors. This represents a planetary ethic of cooperation and sympathy among multiple species in the Anthropocene, transcending the boundaries between the living and non-living.