A Barred Owl And The History Teacher

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A child’s innocence can lead the child to believe anything an adult tells them. Although the poems “A Barred Owl” and “The History Teacher” both explored the idea of adults trying to protect children by telling them lies, the imagery and the diction in each poem shows the different sides of the world and the behavior of children. The lies adults tell children could sometimes make them ignorant while still doing the vicious and destructive things adults were trying to protect them from.
In spite that one poet uses euphemism and the other uses figurative language both poems still convey the same meaning of adults lying to children. In “A Barred Owl”, a child is troubled by the noise an owl is making while the child is trying to sleep. To calm …show more content…

In “A Barred Owl” the poet creates this dark and fearful world, in contrast the poet of “The History Teacher” shows a peaceful world where wars don’t exist. In “A Barred Owl”, we are introduced to the child’s room with “[the] owl’s voice into her darkened room” which immediately puts an image of an eerie room that invokes fear. Another image that shows this dark world is when the child is possibly dreaming “of some small thing in a claw borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw” which shows how despicable nature can be and how these things one can fear of. On the contrary, “The History Teacher” offers more peaceful imagery which can be seen when the teacher is explaining “the War of Roses [taking] place in a garden” therefore making this world a less mischievous one. Moreover, when the teacher is leaving school the image of a perfect world is reinforced by the teacher “[passing] flower beds and white picket fences” which these things normally show peaceful and calm times. Through imagery one can also see the different reactions of the children and how each one takes the lies. In “A Barred Owl”, the child is “send back to sleep at night” which shows that the child believes the lie. Whereas in “The History Teacher”, after the children left the classroom, they started “to torment the weak and the smart, mussing up their hair” which shows that the lies the teacher tells them have no affect on them since they are still exposed to bullying and the atrocious things of these world. Through these images, one can see the differences of world each poet puts in the

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