Similarities Between A Barred Owl And The History Teacher

In Richard Wilbur’s A Barred Owl and Billy Collins’s The History Teacher, a central point of shielding young ones from the truth is given. The two poets show how careful and protective adults deal with the curiosity of children. Wilbur uses playful rhymes along with a non-serious tone in juxtaposition to a child’s irrational fear. Collins uses a manipulative diction to show euphemistic yet disadvantageous protection.
Wilbur’s short and simple poem has a singsong impression as if to give the feel of a comforting mother or father to their child. It is structured in couplets, a simple rhyme scheme, and it is only twelve lines long. This seems to demonstrate a parent’s effort to make light of the conflict, and mitigate attention to the fear to assure/comfort the child. Lines 7-8 say, “Words, which can make out terrors bravely clear, / Can also thus domesticate a fear,” and this is

exactly the motive of the speaker. They calm their child with a juxtaposition, between the thought of an irrational child and reality: “ ‘Who cooks for you?” and “Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw” (6;12). The parent is providing the child a new narrative for their brain to focus on without distorting reality. They are tuning their child’s brain to see the world more clearly and rationally.
Collins provides a poem with a speaker who seems to have a similar motive, however the teacher ends up domesticating a very real reality that is only adding harmful ignorance to young children.

The teacher in the poem explains different events with extreme simplifications and alters vital information to make things seem friendlier such as, “and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom / on Japan” (12-13). Instead of debunking an irrational fantasy, this man is creating a false narrative and presenting it as history. The man’s profession, being a history teacher, makes this an even worse ethical dilemma because he is the only source of history knowledge to these children in their formative years. These juxtapositions go in the opposite direction than those of A Barred Owl-from reality to fantasy. The result is the absence of realizing the evils of this world and thus right from wrong: “the children would leave his classroom / for the playground to torment the weak / and the smart,” (14-16). The use of a light sentimentality here by the author is complimented by poor behavior and a lack of

ethics.
The two poets provide stories of limiting the fears of children. They both use juxtapositions to change the mindset of these children, however, Wilbur does so in a manner that maintains the truth at the same time. The speaker in A Barred Owl has a more romantic and genuine situation complimented by the author’s use of nursery rhyme scheme and helpful juxtapositions. The history teacher in The History Teacher tries to guard the innocence of his students through juxtapositions, based off misleading information, which only results in the antithesis of his intentions: a corruption of innocence and ethics.