Richard Wilbur's "Beasts" expresses nostalgia for a lost Eden, not of childhood, but of unconscious animal existence. Evil is man's alone, created by recognition of suffering and intensified by human efforts to resolve or lessen it. Thus the animals dwell in "major freedom." Wilbur's survey of the chain of being progresses from beasts to man by way of the halfway creature, the werewolf. (One remembers that in traditional descriptions of the chain, man occupies this position.) Reason is now the substitute for transcendent divinity, but it brings with it disintegrating harmony: "major" to "minor"; "concordance" to discord; peace to war; "slumber" to waking, present contentment to unsatisfied yearning.

"Beasts" is unified by pervasive musical imagery. Phrases that first appear to be a series of playful, localized metaphors gradually emerge by the end of the second stanza as a unifying motif and then as a symbolic reminder of the...