Commentary on the Poem Child and Insect

1024 Words3 Pages

Child and Insect is a lovely poem about the disappointment in life, which a little boy is just running into and starting to realize. Robert Druce has portrayed a simple but very appealing image of a very humane situation in a child’s life. The writer has delivered his massage to the readers trough a game of the little boy and the grasshopper. Child and Insect is a poem filled with great a variety of literary terms such as alliteration, symbolism, onomatopoeia, repetition, comparison, contrast, personification and run on lines which work all together in order to reveal three different stages in the poem characterized by a drastic change in the mood and the tone of the writing.

In the stage being the first stanza of the poem Child and Insect the reader meets a little boy who is excited and euphoric because he has managed to catch a grasshopper. The rhythm of the poem is very fast and lively. An evidence for that is the onomatopoeia “clockwork fizz” which describes the insect’s movements as sudden and quick, comparing its legs to the hands of a clock too. It also illustrates its desperate attempts to escape the small palm of the boy described by the opening line of the first stanza “He cannot hold his hand huge enough.” Furthermore, not only the grasshopper’s movements are swift but the boy’s motions as well, shown by the run on line “He races back, how quick he is, look”. This line further emphasizes the rhythm of the poem and the energetic mood it creates. The run on line could also be interpreted as a representation of the child’s speech which is cut and uneven because of his cheerfulness and need for a breath. Moreover, the word choices of the author particularly words such as “snatched”, “quick”, “look”, “sudden” help to reinf...

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...ude, the boy in the poem Child and Insect is not given a name. He is referred to as a “child” and a “he”. The reason why Robert Druce did not give a name to boy is because he wanted to deliver a humane situation which every individual, sooner or later, faces in life. The idea implied behind the game of the child and the grasshopper is about the disappointment in life and the fact that not everything happens as we want it to be. It also delivers a message of how people’s feelings towards others could change for an instant because of a certain factor just like the boy does. The poem Child and Insect portrays the four basic emotions that all individual feel: joy, grief, disappointment, hatred. The child experiences each one of them starting with great happiness and enthusiasm through sorrow and frustration to reach the ultimate point of his feelings rage and hatred.

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