The Ermine (1884)
AUTHOR: Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
PUBLICATION: “The Ermine.” Songs of the Silent World and Other Poems. 1884. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1885. 100-101.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t7fq9qr0z&view=1up&seq=108
KEYWORDS: animal welfare, animals, hunting, social reform
Smith, Ellen Goodell. Our Educators: For War or Peace - Which?
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Palmetto-Leaves
Tryon, Thomas. The Country-man's Companion
Twain, Mark. Mark Twain's Book of Animals
SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):
This poem is a panegyric to the ermine, comparing unfavorably those humans who, in their speciesist arrogance, see her as “prey” to be hunted for her fur (100). The poem reverses the anthropocentric hierarchy in which the ermine is a “dumb, flying, soulless thing,” claiming that, rather, it is humans who are really soulless.
The ermine demonstrates both “sense” and "grace" as she “will not defile / The nature she took from her God” (100). She will not dirty her fur, even in the face of lethal danger. In contrast, humans “[g]o cheering the hunters on / To a prey with that pleading eye. / She cannot go into the mud! / She can stay like the snow, and die!” (100). The hunters “do with her as they will” (100-101). In the conclusion, the poem urges the reader to think of the graceful ermine and the soulless cruelty that humans visit on this animal in order to possess her “garments of holy fire!” (101).