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Free Response to Poetry
Richard Wilbur and Billy Collins both had written a poem on how adults
provide explanations for children. Richard’s poem was about how a child woke up in
the middle of the night from an owl and how the parent or, whoever it was, told the
child that the owl was asking “Who cooks for you,” in the poem “A Barred Owl.” As
to Billy his poem was about how he told his students in history class that certain
events that happened in history were called something different, “Ice Age was
really just the Chilly Age, period of a million years when everyone had to wear
sweaters”, “to protect his students’ innocence,” as Billy said in “The History
Teacher.”
What else that is different from Richard and Billy’s poems is that Richard’s
poem has more rhyme, ”Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear, can also
thus domesticate a fear; the diction he uses is very well thought out, “domesticate,
stealthy and warping.” Also his poem has a nice flow to it, everything goes together
nicely, it makes sense, and the figurative language helps make the poem come to
life.
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Now life is what Billy Collins talks about in his poem for explanations for
children. What is meant by “life” is that he refers to events in history to things
with an entirely different meaning, but it makes it humorous and understandable to
children. The things that are different from Richard’s to Billy’s are that Billy’s
sentence structures is different from Richard’s and that’s said because Richard
used the standard poem outline with the rhyming and such. As to Billy it looked as
if he had a poem structure as well but when it’s read it’s more of a story then a
poem. What also is different from the two when it comes to Billy’s poem is that he
has sentences that vary in length; like one part is only one sentence then it moves
on. What also seems to be different is that Billy sounds sophisticated in his poem
but the reader won’t see anything too hard to understand.
Understanding the similarities with these two poems was kind of tricky. It’s
obvious that they were both a poem to provide explanations for children. What
else they have in common is that they bring up nature in their poems. In the first
one called “A Barred Owl” has an owl talking in it. The second one, “The History
Teacher” talks about the Ice Age, “The War of the Roses took place in a garden.”
No matter what is done in the past, present or even the future; nature is always
going to be involved in someone’s life.
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Richard Wilbur and Billy Collins poems are two poems about life, nature, and
a lesson in which the children will always remember. They do have similarities but
the differences are the most important. It’s said because if two poems are exactly
the same, there isn’t a point to read them. It won’t give the reader a clear
understanding of what the topics about and what the authors think about them
just how Richard and Billy had done their poems. They may be on the same subject,
but their style and their use of poetic elements makes all the difference in
understanding the topic of how adults provide explanations for children.