Barred Owl And A History Teacher Poems

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Adults naturally seek ways of protecting their children from harm, but overprotectiveness often backfires. Children who do not learn the truth about the world from a trusted adult may grow up ignorant or lacking the psychological resilience to face life’s challenges successfully. Both Richard Wilbur and Billy Collins write about different ways adults overly protect their children. Although their poets use different poetic devices, motifs, and symbols, both of these poems share a common theme showing that children do best when they learn how to confront their fears, not run from them.

Although Wilbur and Collins use different poetic devices, the poets both achieve their goal of decrying overprotective adults. Wilbur uses an AABBCCDD rhyme scheme in “A Barred Owl,” which makes the poem read remarkably like a childhood nursery rhyme that perfectly parallels the eerie subject. On the other hand, Collins employs a free verse style, which makes more sense given that the children he depicts are likely to be older than the little girl in “A Barred Owl,” based on the gamut of world history topics mentioned in the poem. Whereas the parents of the little girl in “A Barred Owl” simply make up a nursery rhyme-type tale that anthropomorphizes the owl, the history teacher takes lying to a whole new and much less ethical level.

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As a teacher, it is his responsibility to convey the facts and not pretend that the Enola Gay “dropped one tiny atom on Japan,” (line 12). The teacher does not want the children to hear about blood, violence, and terror, but unfortunately the history of the world cannot be truthfully told without the gory details.

Wilbur and Collins use different motifs to symbolize fear. In Wilbur’s “A Barred Owl,” the title animal symbolizes the terrors of the night and the fears of the unknown. When their daughter awakens from hearing the sound of the barred owl, the parents assuage her fears by telling the young child the owl’s hoot meant it was merely asking, “Who cooks for you?” The owl is not a creature that would harm a little girl; it is simply a nocturnal predator. The parents unnecessarily bar their little girl from the truth about nature. Collins capitalizes on multiple historical narratives to show how the history teacher twists the truth. The overall motif is that of school: the place where students are supposed to learn objective facts….....

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"Barred Owl And A History Teacher Poems", 21 October 2017, Accessed.6 June. 2026,
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