1. UNDERSTANDING POETRY The Barred Owl

2. Sound in Poetry End Rhyme: rhyming couplets throughout boom/room, heard/bird, to/you, clear/fear, night/flight, claw/raw Meter: mostly iambic pentameter – five feet of iambs (unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable) Enjambment: lines 1, don’t know the owl is the source of the boom until line two; lines 3, 4, 5, don’t know what the child is told until the sixth line, each line’s meaning is not revealed until the line that follows. A Barred Owl The warping night air having brought the boom (alliteration, onomatopoeia, enjambment) Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room, (consonance) We tell the wakened child that all she heard (assonance) Was an odd question from a forest bird, (consonance) Asking of us, if rightly listened to, (consonance, assonance (of, us) “Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?” (repetition, internal rhyme (who/you) and onomatopoeia—the woot of the owl as “who”)

3. 2 nd Stanza Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear, (alliteration, consonance) Can also thus domesticate a fear, (consonance) And send a small child back to sleep at night (alliteration, consonance) Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight (consonance, alliteration) Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw ( consonance, assonance) Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw. (assonance, consonance)

4. Literary Devices “The warping night air, having brought the boom,” is perhaps an example—just barely—of personification. The night air’s “bringing,” suggests intent, as if it is actively carrying the boom. Not a great example, I know. Hopefully, something better will turn up. “brought the boom/ …into her darkened room.” Imagery; between the sound and the darkness you can kind of picture the child’s situation. “Who cooks for you?” Personification. This is an unusual case in which the speaker is self- consciously pointing out the personification, noting that his anthropomorphizing of the owl is not used to describe the owl, but to misrepresent the owl so it will be less threatening to the small child. The human qualities are for the child but not for the reader. “words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,/ Can also thus domesticate a fear.” Again, this is kind of a tricky one, but it is a minor example of something called reification. Closely related to personification, reification is the act of taking abstract objects and making them concrete. Words are abstractions, constructions meant to convey ideas or identify things. Here, though, it as if the words have leapt off the page and are either forcing us to look “our terrors” in the face or bringing those terrors under control by “domesticat[ing] them.” Granted, this isn’t the most obvious example of figurative language. It’s not as if the words get up from the page, walk over to fear, and smack it in the face, but there is an element of free agency in which words commit acts rather than record them.

5. Literary Devices “words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,/ Can also thus domesticate a fear.” Again, this is kind of a tricky one, but it is a minor example of something called reification. Closely related to personification, reification is the act of taking abstract objects and making them concrete. Words are abstractions, constructions meant to convey ideas or identify things. Here, though, it as if the words have leapt off the page and are either forcing us to look “our terrors” in the face or bringing those terrors under control by “domesticat[ing] them.” Granted, this isn’t the most obvious example of figurative language. It’s not as if the words get up from the page, walk over to fear, and smack it in the face, but there is an element of free agency in which words commit acts rather than record them. “the sound of stealthy flight/ Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw/ Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw. “ There are elements of imagery here, the “stealthy flight,” the “small thing in a claw” and the “dark branch” offer a glimpse of the fear and struggle that comprise nature’s hunted and prey. “Dark” also has both a literal and figurative meaning, darkness of literal night but also the metaphoric darkness of nature in which things are constantly eating or being eaten by other things. Juxtaposition “Cooks/Raw” the nice contrast of the invented, anthropomorphized owl, cooking in her little owl apron, and the ruthless carnivore that snatches and eats everything raw. Perhaps the most obvious literary device is in the poem’s title, “The Barred Owl.” The title is both literal and symbolic. A Barred Owl is a species of owl native to many parts of the U. S. and Canada. More interestingly, to bar something is to keep it from occurring or entering something. In this case, not only is the Barred Owl barred from entering the house but the parents, the “we” that comprise the speaker, bar it from entering the small child’s consciousness. The owl’s true nature is kept from the child.

6. Theme Now that you’ve worked through the poem’s various sound and literary devices, you are now ready—or almost ready—to identify the poem’s theme. Before you figure out the theme, you need to make sure that you know what happens in the poem. Not that you’ll always be certain of every line but you must have the poem’s gist. In this case, we know the poem is about a small girl who’s been scared by a hooting owl and is comforted by her parents with a little tale that transforms the owl into a friendly nursery rhyme owl, whose “hoot” is a question about cooking. Soothed by the parents, the child goes to bed unaware of the owl’s true nature. Okay, what we have here is a summary of the poem but not its theme. Remember, theme is the idea suggested by the events, not the events themselves. Real literature will almost always have more than one theme and theme will always be subject to interpretation. But theme is also more than mere opinion. Whether or not you’ve found a proper theme is solely dependent on your ability to support it with an honest, rational explanation of the text. In other words, literature doesn’t mean whatever you want it to mean. It means what you can make it mean. Here are a couple suggested themes from “A Barred Owl.”  To establish emotional truths sometimes lying is best.  Childhood weakness demands parental strength.  To the very young, honesty can be a vice.  All of life is fraught with death. Having arrived at a theme (I’m thinking fraught with death because it sounds kind of edgy), now all we have to do is make our case. Really we can use any evidence from the poem as long as we don’t willfully misread it. Ideally, when you fill out your own charts, you will cite an example from the sound or literary devices and explain how the device’s function contributes to theme. Barring that (see what I did there), just find some example and without delving into the technical aspects of your example, just explain how it supports your argument. I’ll show you what I mean with three examples—one sound, one literary, and one generic non-technical example.

7. Proving Theme Theme/Evidence/Commentary Example A (Sound device) A central theme of Richard Wilber’s “The Barred Owl” is that all of life is fraught with death. Wilber develops this theme by painting a prosaic picture of domesticity, complete with a small child whose parents allay her fears by transforming an owl’s scary “boom” into a friendly question of “who cooks for you?” This image of wholesome safety is reinforced by the poem’s meter and rhyme scheme, a series of couplets in iambic pentameter that imbue the poem with the playful feel of a nursery rhyme. Of course, this cheeriness makes the poem’s final image all the more frightening as the owl, clutching prey in “claw,” flies to its “dark branch” to devour it “raw.” Sadly, the darkness of night, the darkness of death, is barred from the nursery for only a little while, and all too soon the little girl will know what the “boom” truly signifies.

8. Literary Device – Proving Theme Example B (Literary Device) In his poem “The Barred Owl,” Richard Wilber employs contrasting imagery to develop a theme of life being fraught with death. Interestingly enough, Wilber is able to take one sound, an owl’s “hoot” and create two different sensory experiences. The “boom,” brought into the child’s “darkened room,” is transformed into “Who cooks for you?” In the first context is a frightened child startled by a strange, menacing sound; in the second, a reassuring parent “domesticates” the sound into a soothing, silly question. Of course, this inquisitive, anthropomorphic owl is replaced by an owl in actuality, a remorseless hunter who snatches “some small thing” to eat it “raw.” Just outside the cozy house o lies death and struggle in all its rawness, a rawness that may be barred for now but will eventually reach them all.

9. Textual Evidence- Theme Example C (General Textual Example) Just to mix things up, I’m going with a different theme on this one. In “The Barred Owl,” Richard Wilber makes a case for dishonesty, graphically demonstrating how emotional truths often rely on dishonesty. When a young girl is frightened by an owl’s “boom” coming to her through “the warping night air,” her parents, the “we” in the poem, tell her that it is just a friendly owl asking, “Who cooks for you?” The parents tell this fib, fully aware of the owl’s predatory nature. This virtuous fib is about more than expediency. It is about security, about building emotional trust so the child will grow into a woman with the strength to face all the darkness life has to offer. It is the security gained in childhood that gives us the strength to live in an insecure world.

10. The Most Important Word Most Important Word and Why, the last and my most favorite part This activity is the most subjective, most liberating of the entire chart. Really, there is no wrong answer except the perfunctory or tautological answer. Perfunctory means half-hearted or incomplete and tautological means using circular reasoning. For example, you cannot say the most important word in the poem is “owl” because the entire poem is about an “owl.” Here are a couple of choices that would work, one serious and one that is kind of silly but also correct. “Voice” is the most important word in the poem for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the owl’s “voice” is the precipitating event, the thing that awakens and frightens the child. Also the poem hinges on the meaning of that voice. Is it a “boom” or a friendly question about cooking, a signal of death or a soothing sound of friendship. By using their voices, the parents are able to vanquish the voice of fear within the child, creating harmony where before there was only discord. The “the” that opens the poem is the most important word. It is a definite article, not “a” night, or “one” night, but “The” night. The “the” gives the night an immensity and a singularity that greatly contributes to the poem’s subtly ominous tone. For example, if the poem began with “A warping night air” it would suggest that this particular night air was an anomaly, something different from other night airs. However, by making it “the,” the speaker creates a permanent threat, something that always accompanies night and not something unique to “a” particular night.