The poems “Traveling through the Dark” by William Stafford and “Woodchucks” by Maxine Kumin portray clashing perspectives on the importance of animals. In the poem “Traveling through the Dark,” a narrator grapples with the decision of pushing a pregnant, but deceased deer over the side of a road. While in the second poem “Woodchucks” a seemingly deranged woman goes on a killing spree to eliminate a family of woodchucks from her garden. Although Stafford and Kumin both use literary devices to reveal how humans value the lives of animals, the different viewpoints of the poems are emphasized through the use of diction and structure.
Both authors utilize diction to express the separate tones of the poems. In “Traveling through the Dark” there is a solemn and contemplative tone, but a blunt and aggressive tone is seen in “Woodchucks.” Much of the difference in the tone is due to word choice used within the poems. In “Traveling through the Dark” there are no unnecessary words used, this gives the poem the appearance of being well-thought out. When the
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In “Traveling through the Dark” the narrator thinks upon the ramifications of saving a fawn still within its mother’s womb at the expense of human lives. Contrasting with the violent slaughter of a family of woodchucks that the narrator in “Woodchucks” seems to causally carry-out. Even though the two poems show two opposing interpretations of the human psyche, the narrators in each choose human life ultimately over the lives of the animals within the poems. While certain humans care more or less about other creatures in nature, actions of the two narrators illustrates how humans place their lives above those of other animals. The use of literary devices such as diction and structure allows to help readers identify the relationship been humans and animals that both authors try to
In “Woodchucks”, Maxine Kuman describes the problem she has in her back yard with woodchucks. She goes into detail of the idea of killing them without hurting them by “gassing” them. She also had no mercy of the woodchucks when she shot at them. Kuman uses her experience with the woodchucks to explain the situation between the Nazis and the Holocaust victims.
Often times, when a person experiences something unusual, that experience stays with them forever. The poem “Driving with Animals” by Billy Collins is about the lasting impression that an experience with deer can create. The imagery, sound devices, and figurative language that Collins uses in the poem draw the reader into the poem and makes them feel as if they are the driver in the car. The element of imagery is important in drawing the reader into the poem.
The speaker of the poem walks through a reaping setting, alone. Lee uses the image of a bird who flies quickly away before the speaker can catch glimpse of it: “I turn, a cardinal vanishes”. This matches the memory that the speaker rekindles from earlier that morning, when his deceased father’s image seems to appear within the trees, and disappear again just as his child draws near. Lee beautifully uses concrete language to portray the picture, specifically the throbbing emptiness when the vision is substituted by a “shovel…in the flickering, deep green shade” (18-19). The sad, uncanny sensation showed by the event creates the lonely, sorrowful mood of the
The following poems all teach readers the importance and significance of wildlife and the horrible treatment they too often receive from human beings. As everything becomes more modern, we can not help but stray farther away from nature. This increasingly insensitive attitude can have detrimental effects on the environment. Although the elements of poetry used in the following poems vary, Gail White’s “Dead Armadillos,” Walt McDonald’s “Coming Across It,” and Alden Nowlan’s “The Bull Moose,” all share one major conflict; our civilization 's problematic relationship to the wild.
One of the aspects of “Wild Geese” that truly struck my fifth-grade self was its use of imagery—I was drawn in particular to the extensive visual imagery in lines 8-13 (“Meanwhile the sun…heading home again”) and awed by the ability of text to evoke images of such clarity. Moreover, in addition to the intrigue of its use of literary devices and the complexity of its recitation, interpreting “Wild Geese” and finding meaning within it was a process that continued well beyond the end of my fifth-grade year, and the connotations of that poem continue to resonate with me. While the entirety of this story is too personal to share herein, “Wild Geese” was a poem that spoke to me on a very personal level. As I sometimes have a tendency to hold myself to unrealistic standards, “Wild Geese” was to me a reminder of the relative insignificance of the trivial matters with which I would preoccupy myself; nature became a symbol of that which existed beyond my narrow fixations and the wild geese a reflection of the inexorable passage of time—in essence, a reminder that “this too shall
The analogy of life, along with the obstacles that one must overcome in order to advance and to succeed is portrayed through the narrator’s experience with a dead deer in “Traveling through the Dark” by William Stafford. An interpretation of the title “Traveling through the Dark” is one’s outlook of life. Ultimately, humans are incapable of being all-knowing; living day by day without the ability to predict tomorrow. The dead deer on the edge of the road symbolizes unexpectancies in life, the speaker 's ability to make a critical decision when no one is watching allows the speaker to progress in the journey of life.
Douglass uses many rhetorical strategies here to make this paragraph sound almost poetic. He has personification through describing the sounds the animals make, metaphor in the line “She gropes her way, in the darkness of age...”, and his choice of diction allowed for words like “feet” and “meet” or “remains” and “things” to rhyme. He uses striking parallelism in the line “She stands- she sits- she staggers- she falls-
According to Frank Madden, “William Stafford earned a Ph.D. from Iowa State University, and for many years taught at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon” (Madden 1164). Safford also wrote a tremendous amount, journaling many of his daily experiences. His first major collection of poems was published when he was forty-eight years old and later received the National Book Award in 1963. “Traveling Through the Dark” is one of Stafford’s most well-known poems because it, like many of his poems, tells an easily comprehensible story with underlying currents of greater meaning.
The tone of “Woodchucks” changes throughout the poem, it starts out with an irritated narrator who becomes obsessed at the end. In the beginning of the narrator is irritated that his “hands off” approach to killing the woodchucks by gassing them and failed. As the poem progresses he slowly takes pleasure in shooting each woodchuck and as days pass and he fails to eradicate all of the woodchucks the narrator becomes more obsessed and driven to kill. The narrator’s obsession is apparent towards the end of the poem when Kumin writes of the narrator keeping his gun “cocked and ready day after day after day” and dreaming of killing the elusive last woodchuck that he yet to kill
The imagery of the first poem greatly contrasts from the overall tone. In “A Barred Owl,” Richard Wilbur describes an owl frightening a child and waking her from her slumber. Wilbur sets the scene with dark imagery: “The warping night air brought the boom/ Of an owl’s voice into her darkened
She utilises a diptych structure which portrays the contrast of a child’s naive image of death to the more mature understanding they obtain as they transition into adulthood. This highlighted in ‘I Barn Owl’ where the use of emotive language, “I watched, afraid/ …, a lonely child who believed death clean/ and final, not this obscene”, emphasises the confronting nature of death for a child which is further accentuated through the use of enjambment which conveys the narrator’s distress. In contrast, ‘II Nightfall’, the symbolism of life as a “marvellous journey” that comes to an end when “night and day are one” reflects the narrator’s more refined and mature understanding of mortality. Furthermore the reference to the “child once quick/to mischief, grown to learn/what sorrows,… /no words, no tears can mend” reaffirms the change in the narrator’s perspective on death through the contrast of a quality associated with innocence, “mischief”, with more negative emotions associated with adulthood, “sorrows”.
In “Acquainted with the Night”, poet Robert Frost examines the inner workings of a lonely, depressed mentality. Through his extensive use of symbolism, Frost demonstrates exactly how confined and flustered someone in that conditions feels. There are two specific symbols that, if analyzed, unravel the meaning behind the poem: the symbol of darkness, the symbol of walking, and the symbol of large distances. Darkness is a perpetually popular symbol, and in this poem, it is certainly prominent/ Historically, darkness has been used to symbolize malice, evil, sadness — generally, anything adverse.
“I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move” written by Louise Erdrich focuses on a child and a grandfather horrifically observing a flood consuming their entire village and the surrounding trees, obliterating the nests of the herons that had lived there. In the future they remember back to the day when they started cleaning up after the flood, when they notice the herons without their habitat “dancing” in the sky. According to the poet’s biographical context, many of the poems the poet had wrote themselves were a metaphor. There could be many viable explanations and themes to this fascinating poem, and the main literary devices that constitute this poem are imagery, personification, and a metaphor.