Poem Analysis: Hedgehog & Night of the Armadillo

Clint Smith is a writer, teacher, and doctoral candidate in Education at Harvard University with a concentration in Culture, Institutions, and Society. Smith Clint wrote a poem called “Something You should Know.” The poem is about an early job he had in a Petsmart. The poet allows the readers into his personal life, but before he had trouble opening up to people and his work. Moreover, Clint wrote an insight in the poem about relying in anything to feel safe and he says it is the most terrifying thing any person can do.

In Woodchucks, a poem by Maxine Kumin, a gardener is having problems with woodchucks invading her garden. She attempts to kill the woodchucks with cyanide gas, but the Woodchucks wouldn’t die. The pacifist gardener, resorts to violence and shoots the woodchucks with a rifle. She was hoping for an easy solution but ended up going against her peace loving ways and turned violent. Throughout the poem, Maxine Kumin slowly reveals the underlying meaning of her writing. Kumin emphasizes that there are violent thoughts and tendencies in every individual by referencing real life events, by escalading the tone of the poem, and by using a series of literary devices.

Humanity is but a facet of the sublime macrocosm that is the world’s landscapes. In the relationship between man and landscape, nature is perpetually authoritarian. In her free-verse poems, The Hawthorn Hedge, (1945) and Flame-Tree in a Quarry (1949), Judith Wright illustrates the how refusal to engage with this environment is detrimental to one’s sense of self, and the relentless endurance of the Australian landscape. This overwhelming force of nature is mirrored in JMW Turner’s Romantic artwork, Fishermen at Sea (1796). Both Wright and Turner utilise their respective texts to allegorise the unequal relationship between people and the unforgiving landscape.

In “The Great Scarf of Birds” by John Updike, he describes the power of nature to impact people by using structure, diction, figurative language, and imagery. By incorporating all of these literary devices, Updike constructs an authentic poem and a great read. The author is truly able to chronicle all the emotions that come with having a change of heart. Every literary device he uses is equally important in construction of the poem and the meaning behind it.

The hedgehog concept is to focus on one main thing until completion. The main thing for Mr. Newson was hiring another black male teacher to fit into a vacancy. Focused attention on teaching and learning did not arrive until the Conservator did. Then, it became her vision for the school district. However, he did make it clear: No excuses allowed for safety initiatives such as shirts not being tucked in and teachers in the hallway during transition.

In Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, McPherson discusses the essay of The Hedgehog and the Foxes. He quotes a Greek poet named Archilochus in his book, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (P. 113). Lincoln is supposed to represent the hedgehog for the reason that the one big thing he knows is equality amongst all men. The one big thing a real hedgehog knows is his only defense mechanisms, which are his spines. So being, McPherson relates Lincoln to a hedgehog for the reason that he is “a leader or thinker who relates everything to a single central vision” (P. 113), surrounded by foxes who “Pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory” (P. 114). Lincoln expresses his one big thing through his many 4 of his brilliant speeches. McPherson depicts Lincoln very well with giving examples from his speeches to show how wise he was and why people listened to what he had to say. Speeches such as the Gettysburg address and his inaugurals gave Americans some kind of

William Blake’s 1793 poem “The Tyger” has many interpretations, but its main purpose is to question God as a creator. Its poetic techniques generate a vivid picture that encourages the reader to see the Tyger as a horrifying and terrible being. The speaker addresses the question of whether or not the same God who made the lamb, a gentle creature, could have also formed the Tyger and all its darkness. This issue is addressed through many poetic devices including rhyme, repetition, allusion, and symbolism, all of which show up throughout the poem and are combined to create a strong image of the Tyger and a less than thorough interpretation of its maker.

In “Monkey Hill,” Stan Rice writes about the speaker of the poem who sits at a zoo with his friend observing the spider monkey exhibit. The two stay the whole day to observe these monkeys. The speaker becomes envious of these monkeys and their ability to be confident with exactly where they are and with who they are. Rice argues that our minds imprison us when we are worried about judgment from others. The monkeys in the exhibit felt free and at ease while the two observers were trapped in worrisome about the outside world in fear of how others would perceive them.

In Robert Frost’s poem “Blue-Butterfly Day” the speaker compares the blue butterflies to “sky-flakes” that fall to the ground in flurries just like snow. What does this comparison say about how the speaker of the poem feels about the butterflies? The speaker could have said the butterflies “dropped to the ground in mangled clumps.” How would that comparison have changed the feel of the poem? In this lesson we will examine how comparisons affect the feel of the poem.

“Grave of the Lizard Queen” [introduces] the reader with the home page consisting of the title, a corpse, and six surrounding objects including the [headpiece] on the corpse [seen in figure 1]. Each object including the corpse’s body making it a total of seven has its own links that lead to short episodes. The short episodes are “displayed” in six uniformed frames aligned in three rows and two columns seen in figure 2 (Carroll /song.html). When the reader clicks a link that directs [him or her] to a new page, there is a similar image of the link above the frames suggesting a connection between the image and the short episode (as) in figure 2 (Carroll /song.html). Although the short episodes of the objects do not contain any narrations or descriptions,

In the poems “Traveling Through the Dark” and “Woodchucks” man must make a decision about nature in the most inconvenient ways. In “Traveling Through the Dark” the narrator is faced with, literally, a life or death situation, whereas in “Woodchucks” the narrator is faced under the Darwinian belief about killing. Both poems reveal the interpersonal relationship between man and animal as well as the moral dilemma that man faces with nature. However, through the use of narration, vivid imagery, and personification, the poets show one speaker’s sympathetic attitude towards the animals while the other speaker has an adversarial attitude toward them.

Blake begins the poem by stating that it is not possible to love another as much as yourself, and that thought is the highest of all human functions. This sets the stage for Blake's attack on religion's ideas of hierarchy and condemnation of rational thought. The next stanza describes the boy asking God, indicated by the capitalized "Father," how he could love him or another human more than a little bird picking up crumbs. The boy states that he loves God in and as much as a little bird. This echoes the naturalist ideas supported in the aforementioned poems. Blake seems to be saying that the proper way to worship and commune with God is by loving all natural beings, human and non-human. The priest, a symbol of organized religion that Blake so sharply critiques, overhears what the boy is saying and is infuriated by the idea that a person could worship God through nature, without ritual, politics, or human involvement, and that the boy dares use his mind to question what he has been taught. The priest makes the boy a martyr, preaching from his high pedestal of pomposity, and burns the boy, despite the cries of his family. The boy's curiosity and natural thinking have been squelched, and his imagination bound in iron chains. Blake closes the poem by asking if such

In addition, the poem contains a satirical, biblical allusion. Brautigan writes, "where mammals and computers/ live together in mutally/ programming harmony." These lines draw a sharp comparison to the famous passage Isaiah 11.6, "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them." This passage refers to peace on earth, the very subject of Brautigan's poem. The reader could conclude that the dangerous beasts made gentle are symbolic of the violent ways of man at its end. Also, the "kid" refers to the new technology of computers, who watch over us in loving grace.

The Caterpillar is a poem which focuses on the previously overlooked actions some of us may partake in, that may not be thought much of, but have short and long lasting effects on a scale we might not be very familiar with. Do we feel remorse for living organisms on a small macroscopic level, or is it just an insignificant part of our complex lives? Is the appreciation of life developed through experiences? Do we feel more pity for a single being that has been through trauma than we do for thousands that have not? In this poem, the conflict between caterpillars and humans is discussed in a such a way that brings up questions about how valuable we perceive other life to be, and how different

Skunk Hour by Robert Lowell and The Armadillo by Elizabeth Bishop are two closely related poems. Both share the theme of an animal carrying with it natural defenses, and the image of an isolated spectator. However, there is one important contrast between these poems: The Armadillo portrays a creature who cannot comprehend the events destroying the life about it, whereas the speaker in Skunk Hour understands, possibly too well, the events affecting its life.