Anyone who has met the title "The Peaceable Kingdom" before will expect lambs lying down with lions. The phrase comes from the Old Testament vision of harmony among animals, and it has long been a favourite subject for painters. Albert Cook borrows that expectation and then quietly complicates it. His poem begins like a morning in Eden and ends somewhere far stranger, with a gloomy figure strolling over ancient stones. The peace is real, but it is not the whole story.
The opening stanza is a catalogue, and the speaker's stance is that of someone waking into abundance: "When I rose round about it was peopled with animals." The line is wonderfully full of round, rolling sounds, and what follows is a joyful roll-call: "Trotting horse, nursing sow, Russian wolfhound." Cook mixes the domestic with the exotic, the farmyard with the savannah, so that the world feels both familiar and endlessly various. His adjectives and participles do a great deal of work. The crane pokes "awkward for nourishment," a phrase that catches the bird's stiff, comic dignity, while the giraffe "nibbling trees" turns a towering animal into something delicate. The "jabbery jungle aviary" gets its noise from sound itself: the repeated j's chatter like the birds they describe. Even the word "champain," an old term for open country, gives the zebra a faintly antique landscape to stand in, as though nature has been waiting a long time for this scene.
Then, in two short lines, the mood turns. "A gazelle, seized by a lion, in terror blacks out, / Other gazelles bound, horns aslant." This is the heart of the poem. The violence is stated flatly, with no commentary, and the verb "blacks out" is strangely clinical, as if the gazelle's mind simply switches itself off. What unsettles the reader most is what happens next: the other gazelles carry on bounding. Cook does not moralise about this. He lets the two facts sit side by side, the kill and the continuing life, and in doing so redefines the kingdom. Peace here is not the absence of death but a world in which death is one event among many.
The third stanza descends into water, and the language grows more abstract and eerie. The fish are "mobile with their sides," a slightly odd phrase that makes them seem all flank and flicker, and they "wink finely in bold unbewilderment." That last word is a small coinage-like twist, a double negative that suggests creatures wholly at home in their element. They do not wonder; they simply are. Deeper down, others "divagate in a black / Element stunned." The word "divagate" means to wander off course, and the break after "black" lets darkness hang for a moment before the stanza closes. The sea seems to hold a kind of mute, dazed wonder at the bottom of things.
The final stanza turns to plants and then to a human, or at least human-like, presence. "Grasses prink in morning winds," a lovely, vain little verb for vegetation, and then the "saturnine / Walker on dolmens parades his eyes, on runes." Saturnine means gloomy, and dolmens and runes are relics of a deep past. The walker is the only figure in the poem who reads, or tries to read, and the only one who seems burdened. Where the animals simply live, he looks at inscriptions. The poem suggests, though it never states, a contrast between innocent immediacy and human self-consciousness.
Formally, the poem is free verse, with no rhyme scheme and an irregular line length. It relies instead on sound and on dense, deliberately unusual vocabulary. This makes it feel like a field-notebook turned into music. Its significance lies in how it refuses the sentimental version of paradise. Cook's kingdom contains terror, darkness and a brooding observer, yet it remains oddly beautiful, and the reader leaves with a more honest idea of what a peaceable world might mean.