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The Bear Prince
The dolphin Sprout narrates “A Letter to Sylvia Plath.” Sprout initially isn’t interested in telling her story, since she thinks that humans are notoriously bad at misinterpreting dolphins’ attempts at communication. But she finds her voice when she decides to address her story to the poet Sylvia Plath. In her introduction, Sprout suggests that humans and dolphins aren’t all that different—the different between the sexes in both species is more significant. She discovers this as she tries to write her story about Ted Hughes’s work (she finds Hughes “too male” and takes issue with how he writes about animals seemingly to justify bad—animal—behavior). She’s eventually drawn to Plath because of how Plath writes about being a mother. Sprout takes her own role as a mother very seriously and indeed, has close familial relationships not just with her blood family members, but also with humans. She loves her trainer, Officer Bloomington, in large part because he treats her as an equal. Sprout tells readers about her upbringing as a Navy dolphin and her ability to identify mines embedded on the ocean floor. Doing her work is, for her, a way to connect with Bloomington and feel close to him. The first thing to threaten this bond is Officer Mishin and Kostya’s arrival—Bloomington falls in love with Mishin instantly, and Sprout and the other dolphins are very jealous. Sprout commits suicide in 2003, after she kills a diver with a lethal dart that she was led to believe was just a harmless tracking device. Sprout makes it clear that dolphins hold humans in high esteem, and that it’s unthinkable for a dolphin to kill a person. But one of the worst parts of her death, she says, is that she can no longer be there for her daughter, Officer. Sprout’s is the most direct voice in the collection that warns readers to treat animals with respect.
The Dolphin/Sprout Quotes in Only the Animals
The Only the Animals quotes below are all either spoken by The Dolphin/Sprout or refer to The Dolphin/Sprout. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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A Letter to Sylvia Plath: Soul of Dolphin
Quotes
Perhaps you should be asking yourselves different questions. Why do you sometimes treat other people as humans and sometimes as animals? And why do you sometimes treat creatures as animals and sometimes as humans?
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Some native wild dolphins were also killed this way, though we’d tried to keep them away from the area by acting territorially. Officer Bloomington took this especially hard. He hadn’t anticipated it as a consequence and blamed himself for their deaths. He felt that the skilled Navy dolphins at least had a chance of defending themselves, but the native dolphins had been put directly in harm’s way. He tried to record their deaths officially so that this could be prevented on future missions, but his superiors blocked him, worried about a public outcry.
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We take killing a human very hard. It is as taboo for us as killing our own babies. We recognise in you what your ancients used to recognise in us and understood as sacred a long time ago, when killing a dolphin was punishable by death. You used to think of us as being closer to the divine than any other animal on earth, as being messengers and mediators between you and your gods. You honoured us with Delphinus, our own constellation in the northern sky.
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The Dolphin/Sprout Quotes in Only the Animals
The Only the Animals quotes below are all either spoken by The Dolphin/Sprout or refer to The Dolphin/Sprout. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
A Letter to Sylvia Plath: Soul of Dolphin
Quotes
Perhaps you should be asking yourselves different questions. Why do you sometimes treat other people as humans and sometimes as animals? And why do you sometimes treat creatures as animals and sometimes as humans?
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Explanation and Analysis:
Some native wild dolphins were also killed this way, though we’d tried to keep them away from the area by acting territorially. Officer Bloomington took this especially hard. He hadn’t anticipated it as a consequence and blamed himself for their deaths. He felt that the skilled Navy dolphins at least had a chance of defending themselves, but the native dolphins had been put directly in harm’s way. He tried to record their deaths officially so that this could be prevented on future missions, but his superiors blocked him, worried about a public outcry.
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We take killing a human very hard. It is as taboo for us as killing our own babies. We recognise in you what your ancients used to recognise in us and understood as sacred a long time ago, when killing a dolphin was punishable by death. You used to think of us as being closer to the divine than any other animal on earth, as being messengers and mediators between you and your gods. You honoured us with Delphinus, our own constellation in the northern sky.
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