Compare And Contrast Collins And Richard Wilbur

Within the two passages given, both authors offer different approaches towards tone, use of dialogue and questions, and overall structure to illustrate the attempts of adults to preserve childhood innocence, with two very different outcomes. Richard Wilbur’s poem, “A Barred Owl,” opens with a sort of narrative, lyrical quality with its subject and use of rhyming couplets. This, along with the “warping night air” of the starting sentence and the mention of the owl as a “forest bird,” add further to the song-like flow that is established and mimics a sort of nursery rhyme or bedtime story to help “a small child” go “back to sleep at night.” By the end of the first stanza, the caring tone of the passage also becomes clear through the responses and actions of the narrators, who are

However, it becomes clear fairly early on that while Collins and Wilbur may be using the same literary devices to present their takes on the subject, they are used in very different ways. From the first stanza and onward, the author uses a variety of short lines and sentences made up of rather simple diction, jumbled or grouped together into several small stanzas as an odd sort of organizational pattern that feels like it is mimicking the sporadic thoughts of a child, helping to still establish the child-like perspective that Wilbur’s poem had also had, and only adding further to the central idea of childhood innocence. Additionally, the lack of rhyme scheme and broken up presentation of the thoughts throughout the poem contribute to a more serious, straight-forward feeling than the first poem, which was expected when the first line of the first stanza directly stated that the teacher was “trying to protect his students’ innocence.” However, the teacher’s version of protecting involves essentially censoring important events in history that he believes the kids would not be able to handle and sugarcoats them with childlike expressions and explanations such as “the Chilly Age,”