This poem is both witty and horrific. A dramatic monologue with a more than usually abrupt—yet articulate—speaker, it suggests a veneer of horror over the appearance of normality. For three stanzas the speaker apparently describes his job as a taxidermist—someone who stuffs animals for display, usually in a museum. As the poem continues we start to view this process symbolically—it is saying something about a process of objectification. Only in the last stanza do we discover that the increasing violence he describes towards the objects of his work is extended to his relationship with an unnamed woman. In the poem, the process of turning animals into objects for display is paralleled to the objectification of woman as passive sexual partners.

  ‘Stuffed’

The title of the poem is ironic: It both describes what is done to the animals in the poem in a literal sense, and describes, colloquially, what is done to them in a metaphoric sense. To be ‘stuffed’ in slang terms means to be ruined, to be frustrated, to be spoilt. It’s aggressive. It is something done to animals/people by the speaker. He has ‘stuffed’ the animals—spoilt them—by killing them. Ironically, he is himself ‘stuffed’ by what he has done.

Peepers

Meaning eyes—a slang use, suggesting a cockney speaker—or a lower-class one (in Porphyria’s Lover’, the girl comes from a higher class than her would-be lover) and reminiscent of peeping, a word associated with illicit, even sexual, watching (cf. ‘peeping tom’). Also irreverent. Replacing the Owl’s eyes is not a serious business. It’s a joke to the speaker.

Owl

Associated with wisdom. Most of the animals named are ones that can be associated with specifically human qualities, there is something anthropomorphic about the choice of them.

Wow

Picks up on the sound of ‘owl’, echoes it and transfers it to the next line. The one-word sentences at the start of the second and third lines of each stanza have a quality associated with the rhetorical figure of apo koinou—something that can be roughly translated as ‘looking both ways’. In this figure, a word or phrase can be thought of as belonging either to the clause that precedes it or to the one that follows it. It ‘looks both ways’ in a syntactic sense, retaining a double meaning for either phrase. (See http://www.xrefer.com/entry/570513 for a more detailed explanation) The full stop here emphasises the detachment of the word by itself, and so its capacity to link with either sentence. Here, ‘wow’ can refer either to the accomplishment of fixing the owl’s eyes, or in anticipation of the fixing of the crocodile’s teeth.

The grin of Crocodile

Again, anthropomorphic—the crocodile is both seen to ‘grin’ –that is, smile in a painful, fixed rictus—and to enjoy the process of stuffing. Note the capitalisation—this is not just any crocodile, it is almost a personification of Crocodile qualities.

Spiv

Originally used of a flashy person who earned his living in the black market during the Second World War—in the ‘unofficial’ economy of exchange, bribery and corruption. Now used for anyone who is seen to be flashy in appearance, and slightly dubious in terms of his source of income (it’s a word used exclusively of men). Someone who is a con man, or more smartly dressed than his means seem to justify. The crocodile (or perhaps the speaker, if the word looks forward to ‘I stitch’…) is thought of as someone with a big grin and an impressive exterior who is trying to pretend to be that which he is not. The one-word sentence again implies a rapid, instant judgement, almost an accusation.

Sew the slither

The alliteration here almost enacts the difficulty of the craftsmanship the taxidermist shows. He is trying to make the eel look as though it is alive: the effect is almost as though he is trying to sew, or fix in place, the movements of a living animal. ‘Sew’ here means both that he is trying to make fixed the slither, and that he is trying to imitate it.

I jerk

Like ‘I screw’ one stanza down, this is capable of a sexual interpretation as well as a literal one. The use of potentially sexual terminology imitates the sexualised feelings of the speaker about his work.

Kick-start

To start a motorbike by kicking away from the road and gunning the motor at the same time. Often used to imply starting up or galvanising something reluctant. With ‘jerk’ it suggests something of the violence and physicality involved in the taxidermist’s craft. He is fixing the mule in a typical position—as though it was kicking with its hind legs. He is also talking about the effort involved in the process.

Mule

A cross between a horse and a donkey. Mules are sterile and cannot breed. They are traditionally used as baggage carriers, sturdy load-bearers (though the Duchess in ‘My Last Duchess’ does ride an elegant white mule around her terrace) and are proverbially stubborn. The phrase ‘as stubborn as a mule’ is used of people.

Wild

Again, could be the mule itself or a comment on the process of stuffing it. It seems to me ironic—wild used as a term of detached, not excited approval. The work is giving him a thrill, the control over the dead animals may not seem thrilling to the reader, but it is exciting the speaker.

A red rag to a bull

Traditionally, Bulls can be made furious by the colour red. Red cloths are used in bullfighting. To hold a red rag to a bull is to enrage someone or something deliberately. Here, the speaker is both literally arranging his display of the animal in a stereotypical position, and also perhaps describing his relationship with someone else. A Bull is another animal associated with human metaphors, particularly representing potency and violence. Think of the film ‘Raging Bull’, for instance.

Mad

The bull’s reaction to the rag. Or a comment on the actions of the speaker. Or perhaps just another term of approbation for his actions (like ‘wild’).

Spread the feathers

Both to display the shape and form of the wings—and also, perhaps, to look at them. The gull is vulnerable to his touch. This fits in with a pattern of words in the poem that have sexual connotations, though they are not used here in an explicit way. Words such as ‘jerk’, ‘screw’

‘spread’, ‘splayed’ are all susceptible to other meanings, and when linked together in the poem they start to suggest a sexual subtext.

A Gull

A seabird—but also a word used to denote a gullible person, a fool.

I screw

Again, a sexual word, used here in an innocuous context. It has undercurrents of violence, force in the way in which it implies the speaker has utter control over the expressions of the animals that he stuffs. He creates the ‘tight snarl’ of the animal as matter-of-factly as a workman driving in a screw.

Weasel

The weasel is a small mammal with a long sinuous body and sharp teeth. Another animal that is used proverbially to express human qualities—this time of sneakiness. ‘Weasel words’ are deceptive, lying words.

I stitch the flippers on a seal

The seal here seems almost like a cuddly toy made to the speaker’s requirements. ‘Sewn’ together and fixed in stasis,  just as he demands.

Splayed

The seal is vulnerable. This both enacts the natural posture of the seal on shore—a posture which the taxidermist quite legitimately imitates when posing the dead animal—and suggests a more general vulnerability, especially the sexual vulnerability of a woman.

I pierce the heartbeat of a quail

This is like murder. The speaker is not talking any more of stuffing animals already dead. It becomes clear that he kills animals in order to stuff them. He doesn’t just pierce the heart, the dead organ, but the ‘heartbeat’ the living moment. The quail is a small, frail bird, emblematic, in metaphorical terms, of a vulnerable person. (The verb ‘to quail’—i.e. to be afraid—imitates this image.)

I like her

Just as threatening, in its way, as Browning’s duke. The speaker’s preference implies force. Just as he likes his animals posed in a particular way, so he likes his woman—who remains anonymous, perhaps unspecified—to behave in a particular way. We might think of ‘Porphyria’s Lover’: ‘That moment she was mine, mine, fair, / Perfectly pure and good’

Naked and to kneel

Both imply vulnerability. Nakedness, especially unwilling nakedness, suggests intense vulnerability—the speaker nowhere suggests that he might also be naked, indeed his mention of ‘her’ might directly imply otherwise. Kneeling suggests submission.

Tame

The woman is described in animal terms. She is ‘tame’, as the stuffed animals are tame, despite their enlivened eyes, teeth, movement, resistance, fury etc. etc. She is naked and kneeling, as he prefers. She is a potentially wild or threatening creature now under control.

Motionless

The woman is so passive that she does not move at all. One might think of death, were it not for the next words.

My living doll

An echo of Cliff Richard’s song ‘Living Doll’, which also speaks about an ideal woman in rather scarily unreconstructed terms:

I Got myself a crying, talking, sleeping, walking living doll

Got to do my best to keep her, just ‘cause she’s a living doll

Got a roving eye and that is why she satisfies my soul

Got the one and only talking walking living doll.

Cliff clearly meant nothing but praise for a woman in saying that she was like a doll—remember that ‘doll’ was a word of praise for women at one time. I suppose you could compare it to being ‘a Barbie Girl’ more recently. Nonetheless, the speaker of the poem picks up on all the potential undercurrents of the song. A doll is not only passive, it does not need to be considered as a human does (think of blow-up dolls? The last refuge of those in search of a passive sex object?) To be a ‘living doll’ might be rather scary, even if you’re being praised for it.

Mute

Speechless. More than that, intentionally deprived of speech. Someone is mute who cannot speak, indeed ‘mute’ slaves, illiterate slaves who had had their tongues cut out, were in various eras favoured as being less able to tell secrets. The woman is characterised like this, as a ‘mute’, unable to speak.

Afterwards I like her not to tell

At one level, a plea for sexual privacy—the speaker does not want his lover to tell anyone about the way in which he enjoys her. Paradoxically, he publicises this emotion. The implication is rather sinister—that he will ensure that she cannot tell ‘afterwards’. Perhaps this is why she is ‘mute’. The only certain way to ensure that she does not speak is, of course, to reduce her to an object in real as well as symbolic terms, and kill her. The unmoving, silent ‘doll’ suggests that like Porphyria’s Lover, he may already be enjoying the imagined complicity of a murdered lover: ‘….she guess'd not how / Her darling one wish would be heard. /And thus we sit together now, /And all night long we have not stirr'd’.

An interesting comparison might be with Roald Dahl’s short story ‘The Landlady’, where taxidermy starts off as something that seems homely and innocent, and ends up suggesting unspeakable horrors for the protagonist. In ‘The Landlady’ a young man searching for a room in which to stay happens upon a cosy house with an apparently friendly landlady. In the course of the story it becomes clear that the landlady is an amateur taxidermist: the pets that the young man thought made her rooms look so cosy when he looked through the window are in fact stuffed.

Slowly we (and the protagonist) realise that the landlady’s other guests, people invisible throughout, though she assures him they are ‘upstairs’, are people who have mysteriously disappeared, and the story ends with his realisation that she may have stuffed them. More; that she may be planning to kill and stuff him as well: that the cosy, slightly batty woman he describes, is in fact a murderer (‘the tea tasted of bitter almonds’). The skill of the woman of the title becomes transformed into a murderous threat, as her guest realises that when she says that ‘I stuff all my little pets’ she is referring to more than just her dog and parrot. It is never made explicit that the Landlady is the murderer of the missing men who have signed her guest-book and disappeared, but as the story progresses it becomes evident that innocent explanations are going to be harder and harder to find. The landlady preserves her pets (and guests) so that they will stay perfect, ‘unmarked’, so that they will stay with her and bear her company. A similar drive towards preserving relationships lies behind ‘Stuffed’, though the speaker is more violent than the Landlady ever appears.

The impulse to keep something forever by killing it is well evidenced in other poems. I’m thinking particularly here of Browning. ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ are both dramatic monologues that introduce us to the idea of men who try and perfect their relationship with an uncontrolled or only periodically submissive woman by killing her. There’s an interesting essay on this subject, connecting the making static of a woman’s image with the control implied in the Pygmalion myth, by Catherine Maxwell. You can read it at http://calliope.jhu.edu/demo/elh/60.4maxwell.html.

In ‘My Last Duchess’ (http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/rb/duchess.html), the duke who speaks explains that he has killed his wife, because she did not behave as he felt his wife ought to: she lacked a reserve, a submission to his will, that he was not prepared to negotiate about with her (‘I choose/ Never to stoop’). The Duchess’s pleasure in small, everyday things, her smile given to servants—even to the monk who paints her picture—represents to the Duke an imperfection in her that he cannot bear. He speaks of his ‘last duchess’ to the envoy sent to negotiate his next marriage, as a sort of object lesson for his prospective wife: in this way he indicates, as he imagines subtly, how a bride of his ought to behave. The duchess is dead, represented only by her picture. Only in this way can he control her, only in this way can he make her into the object that he wants to own, the rare thing that pleases him in all ways. The murder here is not made explicit: we are simply told that the unpleasing, indiscriminate smiles of his wife were dealt with: ‘This grew: I gave commands/ Then all smiles stopped together’.  The irony is that the duchess is more valuable to her husband as a fresco than as a living woman. Life here is seen as something untidy, something to be controlled and disciplined through art.

Perhaps the closest analogue to ‘Stuffed’, though, is Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (see http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/rb/porphyria.html). ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (originally published with another poem under the heading ‘Madhouse Cells’) is a monologue spoken by a murderer, implicitly one who is now in a madhouse, reliving his crime to anyone who will listen. The speaker is anonymous, known only (through the title) as Porphyria’s Lover—he is validated, and validates himself, solely through this relationship. He tells how he waited for Porphyria one night, to leave some party and creep out to meet him in a lonely cottage. It is implied that she is of higher status than he is, and that he is insecure about the future of their relationship as a result. On this night, however, all goes as he would wish. She arrives, makes up the fire for him, and puts her arms around him, coaxing him into a good mood. He realises that at this moment she truly loves him and has chosen to meet him rather than to stay with her friends. It is a moment of supreme pleasure for him: ‘I knew/ Porphyria worshipped me’. At this moment, fearful that what comes after will not match this—that the girl will not have the strength of will to persist in her choice—he strangles her with her own long hair. In the poem he endlessly re-lives the aftermath, as though he were still sitting with the corpse leaning upon him.

 In both ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘Stuffed’, the poet suggests how love, and the love of control, turns to obsession and potentially to murder. The end of ‘Stuffed’, like ‘The Landlady’ leaves us with a murder that is only implicit, if indeed we are speaking of murder, though the controlled violence is clearly present. In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ much of the violence is also implicit, and the murder is similarly skirted around. The speaker doesn’t speak of murder, but of ‘A thing to do’, and it’s only because he does state that he ‘strangled’ Porphyria that we realise exactly what has been done. The murder is seen to be something that preserves the loved woman, something that enacts her deepest wishes. It is certainly nothing painful or unpleasant:

                        No pain felt she;

 I am quite sure she felt no pain.

As a shut bud that holds a bee,

I warily oped her lids: again

Laugh'd the blue eyes without a stain.           45

And I untighten'd next the tress

About her neck; her cheek once more

Blush'd bright beneath my burning kiss:

I propp'd her head up as before,

Only, this time my shoulder bore                   50

Her head, which droops upon it still:

The smiling rosy little head,

So glad it has its utmost will…

In ‘Stuffed’, the woman in the last stanza of the poem is similarly silent and complicit. She should not tell what has happened to her if she wants to please her lover—the obvious means of control for the speaker is her death, the final assurance that she will not reveal his secret. Like the silenced Porphyria, or Ferrara’s duchess, she can no longer answer back. Like the stuffed animals, she has become an object. She is controlled, posed as he wishes, a plaything that cannot resist. This poem says some dark things about certain imagined male fantasies.