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Similarities Between A Barred Owl And The History Teacher

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The two poems “A Barred Owl” and “the history teacher” both work to show the innocence of a child, and how the characters in the poem work to try to preserve it. In the first poem by Richard Wilbur, the child is frightened by the owl’s voice. However, the child is told, “All she heard was an odd question from a forest bird….” This shows the person trying to protect the child’s innocence. In the next poem by Billy Collins “The History Teacher” the first line says “trying to protect his students innocence” and goes to explain how he teaches the history in correctly so that the children can be spared from knowing the scary truth. Both poems towards the end show a sense of irony. They both have a dark and twisted ending. The bird in the first
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The poems “A Barred Owl” and “The History Teacher” were both written around the year 2000 by Richard Wilbur and Billy Collins. In past poems, these two poets loved throwing in hidden themes and figurative language throughout each of their poems. These two men, though they have never met, have many similarities when it comes to their moral outlook. At the same time, Wilbur and Collins have different ideas for how their beliefs are put into action. With this in mind, the poems “A Barred Owl” and “The History Teacher” use a central theme of fabricating reality, but the motives behind each the lies are of opposite intent and will wage different outcomes in the future.

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The Northern Spotted Owl is currently classified as threatened and is currently undergoing conservation efforts in order to bring its population numbers back up. The Northern Spotted owl is the largest of the three subspecies of spotted owls. They are medium sized, dark brown owls with barred tails and white spots on their head and breast. The males are slightly larger than the females and are often confused with the barred owl. They are primarily nocturnal but still forage opportunistically during the day.

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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

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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”.

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He could imagine his deception of this town “nestled in a paper landscape,” (Collins 534). This image of the speaker shows the first sign of his delusional ideas of the people in his town. Collins create a connection between the speaker’s teacher teaching life and retired life in lines five and six of the poem. These connections are “ chalk dust flurrying down in winter, nights dark as a blackboard,” which compares images that the readers can picture.

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335 Words | 2 Pages

The use of allusion in the two poems “The History Teacher by Billy Collins and “Outdistanced” by Larry Rubin punctuate the shared theme that that a willful lack of self-awareness can quickly lead to a greater ignorance of what could shape humanity. Throughout both poems, allusion is applied in order to create the theme that ignorance, due to a lack of self-awareness, can shape humanity. In Collins’ poem, a history teacher tries and fails to disseminate the misinformation that there is no violence in history in order to protect the innocence of his pupils. However, this severe lack of wisdom leads to the, “torment of the weak/ and the smart,” (lines 14-15) on the playground.

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“It was covered with a film of Paris green sprinkled to kill the rat, and the screech owls had built a nest inside it” (Hurst 353). The tone of the “Scarlet Ibis” is mournful and melancholy from start to finish about a boy who struggled through his life trying to be like his older brother. Through the use of figurative language, imagery, and symbolism James Hurst wove a tale that touched everyone's hearts.

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The peacocks become a central point of the narrator’s life. The narrator describes the appearance and attitude of these grand birds in great

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In a world where things are constantly changing, parents must work hard to protect their children from the evils of the world and sometimes in order to do that little lies must be told. The difference is what extent the adult will go to in order to protect the innocence of children and knowing when they have gone too far. Two poems that include examples of adults providing explanations to children are “A Barred Owl” by Richard Wilbur and “The History Teacher” by Billy Collins. Although both share the idea of explaining things to children, Richard Wilbur’s “A Barred Owl,” is centered around a young child that is awoken by the sounds of an owl’s voice and is then comforted by her parents telling her that there is nothing to fear. He makes a

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Barn owls can be really easy to identify as long as you see their pale white and caramel soft feathers and their heart shaped body structure. Barn owls have an interesting shape and size. A barn owls shape looks a lot like a heart so I guess that is why they say that barn owls have a heart shaped body. Their size can vary from 32-40cm in height.

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The poem “The History Teacher” by Billy Collins has a greater lie than “The Death of Santa Claus”, in its intention to save the innocence of students. It is necessary to tell the truth when the lie is destroying students future and breeding ignorance. To begin, in this poem the history teacher is trying to protect the innocence of his students by simplifying most historic allusions to make them sound friendly and less important. For example Collins writes, “The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more than an outbreak of questions...” (Collins 7-8).

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The poem “History Lesson” written by Natasha Trethewey has a unique form of style and rhythm that causes the reader to rely more on their comprehension of the story than the presented facts. Specifically, in the beginning of the poem the writer describes herself standing, with her hands on her hips in a flowered bikini while her grandmother, beaming, takes a photograph of her. In the middle of the poem she states that the beach has recently been opened to people like her and her grandmother. Finally, at the very end of the poem she says “Forty years since the photograph where she stood on a narrow plot of sand marked colored, smiling, her hands on the flowered hips of a cotton meal-sack dress.” The writer formatted this poem in a way where she did not put the information together in order to create ambiguity.

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In two poems “Sympathy” written by Paul Laurence Dunbar and “Caged Bird” written by Maya Angelou talk about a poor bird that is trapped in a cage and wants to be free. It longs for everything that the free bird has but it cannot achieve it. In both of the poems, there is a use of comparisons between freedom and nature. It is also interpreted from the poems that the use of a song is a form of coping for the birds. Both of the birds sing for their freedom and sing through their pain.

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Hope, Rage, and Sacrifice Oppression is an illness that has plagued the world for centuries. This is shown in “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar and “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou as the birds are trapped by oppression and the birds must break free from it. Maya Angelou and Paul Laurence Dunbar use the central symbols of the free bird and the caged bird to reveal the theme of oppression. The symbols of rage and hope accompany the theme oppression.

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In the two poems Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Caged Bird by Maya Angelou, gave a comparison between the life of a caged bird and the life of a slave. There are similarities and differences in the two poems. The difference between the two poem is that Sympathy is more aggressive than the poem Caged Bird, and the similarities of the two poems is the theme and imagery. The poem Sympathy the poem

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