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Similarities Between A Barred Owl And The History Teacher

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Frymire 1 George Frymire Dr. Degen Pre AP English 2 30 January 2015 The Influence of Words \ In Richard Wilbur’s “A Barred Owl” and Billy Collin’s “The History Teacher”, both authors use lies in order to tame the fears of young children; however, in “A Barred Owl”, the child assimilates the lie as truth. On the other hand, in “The History Teacher”, the students, incredulous of their prevaricating teacher, mock his spurious teachings. In the first stanza of “A Barred Owl”, the poem begins with a dark, ominous, “warping night air” sweeping into the child’s room, which “brought the boom, of an Owl’s voice into her darkened room.” (ADJSC) The “warping night air” suggests the atmosphere to be chilling, as though something were awry. The air “brought the boom” and caused her to wake up. The boom could be taken literally as a noise from the storm outside, but in reality it comes from the owl’s harsh, frightening voice. The eeriness of the sound wakes the child up, and thus allowing the inconsistent and irrational traits of fear to set in on the child. Voice screeching, the owl strikes fear into the heart of the girl …show more content…

Wilbur writes about the ways that words can affect people, “Words can make our terrors bravely clear” but “Can also thus domesticate a fear.” A fear can be silenced by a simple euphemism. At the end of the poem, the fear that struck the child diminishes as the power of the parent’s words comforts the child to sleep. In the closing lines, Wilbur brings back the fear, inferring the child could “dream of some small thing in a claw, Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.” Wilbur infers a double meaning, one scenario in which the parents quell the danger and another where the child dreams of being carried away by the creature, and eaten raw, thus showing the parent’s words cannot mask fear, for the only thing the child can fear is fear

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