Child and Insect
Question 1A
(Candidate no.: 000637010)
55555: 25
The poem ‘Child and Insect’ details a child’s first encounter with the dualistic nature
of life – both its fragility and its tenacity; and the child’s response to his experience.
Through the poet’s diction, use of stylistic devices such as alliteration and
enjambment, and his use of vivid sensory imagery, the poet contrasts the child’s
attitude towards life before the incident, and his attitude after the incident. By
following the boy’s emotional journey and growth – from ignorance to understanding,
from incomprehension to epiphany, the reader is able to empathize with the
magnitude of the process to the boy, and understand how such an encounter may
irrevocably change a child’s view of the world, and of himself.
The reader is drawn immediately into the boy’s world with the first line – ‘He cannot
hold his hand huge enough’. From the onset we are able to empathize with the boy’s
fascination with the magnitude of life: the insect he clutches between his hands is
‘huge’, and it flutters like a ‘clockwork fizz’. This refers to the fluttering sensation of
the insect’s wings that the boy feels, as it struggles to escape from the ‘café’ of his
hands. Such sensory imagery is both powerful and effective in conveying the
magnified nature of a child’s perception. The insect must be ‘caged’; this allusion of
the insect to a feral beast again conveys the magnitude of life to the boy and his
excitement by it.
The boy ‘races’ back to his mother, hoping to share with her the powerful vitality of
life. The poet’s diction effectively conveys the boy’s sense of urgency. He ‘snatches’
the insect, and runs through a ‘shrieking’ meadow – such personification and
combination of visual and aural imagery allows the reader to fully comprehend a
child’s worldview – in which all experiences are magnified.
However, the boy reaches his mother and opens his palm to find ‘silence only’ in his
‘fearful clutch’, the grasshopper is revealed to the ‘broken’. The suddenness of this
revelation is conveyed by the lack of any breaks in sentence and paragraph structure;
the ‘shrieking’ meadow is immediately contrasted by the ‘silence’ of the insect’s
death. The abruptness with which life has been extinguished is both shocking and
paralyzing – this is conveyed by the break between the first and second stanzas, when
the boy takes in the damage one.
Formerly exuberant life is ‘nothing’ now, and the contrast to the metaphor of life in
Stanza 1 as a powerful beast, is startling and again conveys the magnitude of such a
revelation to the boy. The use of alliteration in describing the insects’ ‘snapped
struts’, and the use of words such as ‘brittle’ and ‘crushed’ convey the ease with
which fragile life can be destroyed.
The second paragraph break between Stanzas 2 and 3 mark a transition in the boy; as
the irregular sentence structure and the long ‘pause’ signifies the boy’s crossing of an
internal threshold – with the realization that his own carelessness could have
destroyed the beauty and magnificence of life. Sunlight and landscape are ‘flooded’
by tears; the experience is overwhelming, cathartic, and of great significance to the
boy’s developing awareness of himself, his faculties, and the world in which these
faculties are limited and surpassed by the cycle of life and death out of his control.
As the boy ‘cradles’ in his hands the broken insect we are again reminded of the
fragility of life. The boy struggles to suppress his desire to be comforted – ‘will not,
O, will not’ is repeated twice, the second time as a sentence independent of the stanza
before it. We sense that the boy is convinced of his guilt and reasserting to himself
that he is strong in the face of adversity. His need to ‘cage’ his emotions mirrors how
he attempted to ‘cage the insect’; this foreshadows that his attempts to do so may fail
as did his attempts to capture life.
With a suddenness that is again, startling, the ‘undead’ insect ‘re-assembles itself’ as
if by ‘magic’, and the short sentence structure mirrors the quickness with which life is
resurrected with a ‘flick’. The resurrection is magical, powerful; the insect ‘throbs’,
pulsing with life, and ‘latches’ itself onto a leaf. This image conveys the tenacity of
life – the paradox that it can be fragile, and powerful, both destructible and
indestructible because it can be regenerated.
The boy shows an outpouring of emotion, and the reader becomes aware that a duality
has emerged in the boy’s emotions – he ‘weeps, sick with relief and rage’. Just as life
may appear to the boy to be of a dual nature, his response to it reveals an inner
conflict and division that was not apparent before. Though his mother attempts to
comfort him, he ‘shakes her off’; whereas formerly he could not wait to share his
excitement with her. Already he is distanced from his mother, and this transition in
the boy’s attitude marks the beginning of the boy’s emotional growth; he no longer
wants to be comforted like a child.
The boy is angry, he feels ‘cheated’, and refuses to ‘rejoice’ at life’s regeneration –
whereas formerly life appeared magical, he now sees it as ‘petty trickery’ – he feels as
if his ‘grief’ has been ‘betrayed’. The boy is now aware of how in reality events may
be out of his control - although he wants to preserve life, he extinguishes it; although
he wanted to appear indifferent, and that ‘he did not care’, ultimately his tears and his
rage meant he failed to suppress his emotions. The last line of the poem notes that the
boy feels ‘naked’ – he has been unmasked, all his actions have been futile in
achieving their goals, and he is not as unaffected as he has tried to be to.
This recalls the title of the poem = ‘Child and Insect’, which alludes to the egocentric
view of a child. Indeed, the incident is ordinary in the cycle of life and death) and his
mother treats it as such, but for the boy, whose sensory perceptions are magnified, the
event is personal and upsetting, as limited to just the ‘child’ and the ‘insect’. H has
been painfully reminded of his own vulnerability, tears have been involuntarily
‘wrenched’ from him = he understands that he has little control over himself, over his
emotions, and his actions are of little significance to the progression of the world. He
cannot change things through either destruction or preservation; an experience that
has seemed so significant to him is of little importance to the world; even an insect is
capable of overturning the consequences of his actions.
In the last Stanza, the boy appears to be indifferent, but secretly desires to ‘snatch’
and ‘shatter’ the insect. We are reminded of the change in the boy’s attitude, the
fragility of life, and the division between thought and action that has emerged. The
word ‘snatched’ frames the poem; in the first three lines, he desires to ‘snatch’ life to
prolong and preserve it; in the last 3 lines he wants to ‘snatch’ life to destroy it. The
poet’s repeated use of contrast and imagery, effective manipulation of sentence
structure and stanza length, all contribute to the power of witnessing the boy’s
emotional turbulence, his transition into adulthood, and the realization of his own
limitations in the reconciliation of the magnitude of his own emotions with a less
magnificent reality.