Due Monday, January 14th - "A Barred Owl" and "The History Teacher"

Directions: Please read and respond to the two poems below. Think about your first gut reactions to each piece. Next, read the poems again...and again...and again.  Notice how much more you see.  Explore the authors’ use of literary devices and poetic form. How does our work with sonnets help inform how we read modern poetry?  Then, compare and contrast the poems in terms of both thematic elements and form. I look forward to your responses.  Engage with each one another.

"A Barred Owl"
By Richard Wilbur

The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

Richard Wilbur, "A Barred Owl" from Mayflies: New Poems and Translations. Copyright © 2000 by Richard Wilbur.



"The History Teacher"
By Billy Collins

Trying to protect his student’s innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
“How far is it from here to Madrid?”
“What do you call the matador’s hat?”

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom 

on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground and torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.

“The History Teacher” from Questions About Angels Copyright ©1991 by Billy Collins