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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 June 2025
In 1798, Elizabeth Moody, English poet and literary reviewer, published the poem “An Address by a Gentleman to His Dead Dog; Which Was Stuffed, and Placed in a Corner of His Library” as part of her collection, Poetic Trifles. And yet, despite the collection's title, I suggest that we can brush against the grain and read this poem seriously as adumbrating the complexities and dark side of taxidermy, still in its infancy.
Yes, still, my Prince, thy form I view,
Art can again thy shape renew:
But vain I seek the vital flame
That animated once thy frame.
Extinct the vivifying spark,
That tongue is mute—those eyes are dark.
In vain that face I now explore;
It wooed me with its love,—no more.
No more thy scent my steps shall trace
With wagging tail and quicken’d pace.
No e’er again thy joyful cry,
Proclaim thy darling master nigh.
Alas! thy shade alone remains,
Yet Memory all thou wast retains;
Still on thy living image dwells
And all the winning fondness tells.
She courts the muse to spread thy name
Beyond life's little span of fame.
Well pleas’d could verse stern death defy,
And bid that Prince may never die.
If, Moody's poem suggests, the art of taxidermy might capture the shape or form of the pet named Prince, it fails to capture the “vital flame” of the “vivifying spark” that is now “extinct.” The speaker “explores” the taxidermied dog's face, a description suggesting the uncanny as it flickers between registers of the familiar and unfamiliar, as fur gives way to fuzziness. Prince, it seems, is now stuffed with uncertainty. Just who or what is Prince now? we might imagine the speaker wondering. The “Yes… / But” of the first stanza (which will find a rejoinder in the “Yet… / Still” of the second stanza) like a response to a question also reveals the way taxidermy calls to and disappoints the speaker. Taxidermy's ontological fuzziness and its failures are here, and elsewhere, part of its dark side.
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