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Comparing Mountain Lion and Badger Essay

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Comparing Mountain Lion and Badger

These are two poems that were written at the beginning and end of the nineteenth century. The views on animal hunting and animal cruelty are very different today. Animals such as badgers were hunted for sport; it was considered to be entertaining to track a badger using dogs and capture and torture it until death. Animas such as the Mexican mountain lion were hunted in Mexico for a profit, their fur was a highly sought after fashion item and was sold at very high prices.

Both the poems describe animals that are put through a chase before they are killed. The badger is portrayed as aggressive and fierce yet he is demure, the first two characteristics are masculine but the badger also seems …show more content…

Repetition is also used, "she will never" this brings home the fact that the mountain lion is dead and all the things that were affected by her will notice the loss and be greatly affected by it. At the beginning the repetition of, "gun" shows that the poet's party become un-nerved and intimidated.

They are wary, as animals would be in the same situation. The alliteration of 'f' in 'face', 'frost', 'fashioned', all add to the perfection of this creature and how amazed the poet is. As the 'f' sound is quite soft.

In Badger the poet sets the scene very differently to that in Mountain
Lion. Badger has a very busy and fast moving situation the beating rhythm of the poem reflects this, it also shows the pounding beat of the badgers heart as it is running for its life. There is tension as the dogs and men enter on the scene.

During the poem the badger varies its reaction as though it is working to a plan, like it is trying to fool the men, "runs along and bites", and, "The badger grins." The strong rhyming couplets of Badger also give an exited, noisy and chaotic atmosphere. There are ten syllables to each line and fourteen lines in each of the two stanzas. There is also a lack of commas and pauses all the way through until the end when the badger finally dies, "and crackles, groans, and dies." The use of commas shows the slow death of the animal as all its energy is

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