Anne Scott Musil’s “On Manitoulin Island” opens as a notebook of encounters: gulls, chipmunks, rabbits, geese, all being fed by human visitors. But the poem quickly complicates that peaceful scene. The opening lines present “great grey-white screaming / gulls,” one of which sits “on a rock / for hours waiting” and is fed first. Already there is a hint of transaction and dependence rather than pure wildness. The chipmunks are “quick chirping” with “sharp / stripes,” the rabbits are “somewhere - / shy and snuffling,” and the geese over the bay are watched with an awareness that feeding “could make them / too trustful of hunters.” The speaker is not simply enjoying nature but measuring the consequences of human kindness.
The central idea lies in the turn at “for ourselves / our pets we say.” Feeding the animals is exposed as a need the humans have, not only a gift they give. They want the animals “to turn to us,” to make the feeders feel “acknowledged needed”; they want to “share / our origin share rock fir shallows sand / one air with them.” That unpunctuated rush of “rock fir shallows sand” sounds like a prayer, the names of the island’s elements tumbling together as if saying them could close the distance between human and animal. The word “share” appears twice, as verb and longing: to share origin, rock, fir, shallows, sand, one air. The poem’s repeated “we” matters, too: it never lets the reader stand outside the scene. This is the poem’s emotional core—humans feeding animals as an attempt to belong to the landscape rather than stand outside it.
The poem is free verse, with short, irregular lines and no rhyme. Its rhythm comes from breath and pause: “rabbits - somewhere -” hangs in uncertainty, while the dash before “do they know that? forgive? -” opens a silence. The lower-case lines and broken syntax, such as “to feel acknowledged needed share,” make the thought feel immediate, unfinished, as if the speaker is correcting herself mid-sentence. The imagery is precise and physical: grey-white gulls, black-striped chipmunks, green-necked geese. Those colours are alive, yet each animal is also described by sound or movement—screaming, chirping, snuffling—so the scene is heard as much as seen.
The final section shifts from the local beach to a planetary scale. “Both - they and we - briefly visiting” insists that humans and animals are alike in being temporary, earth-fed bodies. But the speaker immediately qualifies this: “we imagining we’re earth-fed bodies / just like them uprooted / by our thoughts.” Human consciousness is presented as an uprooting, a separation from the very body and earth the speaker longs to share. The phrase “this polluted planet whose frail life / we suck poison distort” turns the feeding hand into an image of harm. The poem’s hardest question is not about what the animals need, but whether they can “know that? forgive?” The word “forgive” suggests that feeding is also an act of atonement—small, perhaps inadequate, offered “to undo centuries / of guns.”
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to settle into either sentimentality or despair. It does not pretend feeding gulls erases damage, nor does it dismiss the impulse as useless. Instead it holds together tenderness and guilt: the same hands that offer food belong to a species that poisons the planet and has hunted for centuries. “On Manitoulin Island” asks whether a moment of acknowledged kinship across species can carry any weight against so much harm. The poem’s answer is not a solution; it is the question itself, left hanging after “forgive?”, as open as the island air.