Summary
In the first stanza, the unnamed first-person speaker rises at dawn while her family members continue to sleep. She feels “blessed” by the rising sun. She quietly obtains her father’s gun and sneaks out of her home. While doing so, she reflects on her parents’ ignorance of her activities. Her parents think that she is an obedient, angelic child; in reality, she is planning a rebellion against her family’s authority by using the gun. This reflection continues into the second stanza. The speaker thinks contemptuously about her father and scorns how he constantly says “no.” She thinks that her father is now powerless to stop her because he is asleep. She looks ahead to the owl that she knows will be in the barn at this dawn hour. She imagines the owl sitting on a high beam in the stables.
Analysis
The first two stanzas foreshadow the remainder of the poem and create a sense of suspense. The first line utilizes a caesura—a pause in the middle of a line of poetry—that immediately creates a disjointed tone, reflecting the speaker’s anticipation and uneasiness. Specifically, the caesura is created by using a colon in between “daybreak” and “the household slept.” This first word, “daybreak,” is harsh and abrupt, standing apart from any context, unmoored from the remainder of the line and the poem through the use of a colon. As contrasted with its synonym, “dawn,” the compound word “daybreak” carries more violent connotations through the use of the word “break,” which foreshadows the violence the speaker will perpetuate against the owl. Following the colon, the speaker does not introduce herself, but refers to a “household,” suggesting both the location of the poem (a house) and the presence of other people within the house. Thus, the first line creates a foreboding image of the speaker alone in a silent, sleeping household at dawn.
In the following line, the speaker emphasizes her individuality by contrasting herself with the household. While “the household slept,” the speaker “rose” (lines 1-2). This distinction between the speaker and her family is further developed throughout the stanza. The speaker creeps out with her father’s gun, asserting ownership over this violent object. She expressly describes the inversion of the house’s typical power dynamic. While a father normally can assert authority over his child, here the speaker rejoices because her father has been “robbed of power / by sleep” (lines 7-8). She derisively refers to her father as an “old nay-sayer,” building on the theme of individuality to imply that the speaker wants to develop her sense of personal identity by rebelling against the “nay-sayer” who limits her activities. The speaker also says “let him dream” in reference to her father. This ironically puts her father in a childlike light, as the speaker decides to let him continue sleeping, whereas typically a parent is tasked with waking up their child. In sum, the two stanzas introduce the theme of rebellion by contrasting the child’s individuality with her parents’ innocence.
The first two stanzas also use subtle religious and moral subtext to further foreshadow the speaker’s confrontation with the realities of evil and death. The speaker ironically describes herself as “blessed / by the sun,” as if she is imagining herself on a holy mission (line 2). This description emphasizes the speaker’s naivete and her confident mindset prior to the violence of killing the owl—she feels that what she is doing is justified or that she has received a “blessing” from the universe to carry out this act. The child imagines that her father views her as having an “angel-mind,” further building on this religious language (line 6). However, she seeks to distinguish herself from this angelic vision. While her father imagines that she is innocent, in reality she has sneakily “crept” out of the house with a violent object, a gun (line 3).
On an immediate level, these stanzas introduce the protagonist (the speaker) and the antagonists (the owl and the speaker's parents). The child speaks derisively both of her father (an “old nay-sayer”) and of the owl, which she views not as a living being but as an inanimate “prize” to be won (line 8). The speaker ominously describes herself as a “fiend” that is associated with the night, whereas her “prize,” the owl, will be weakened because its eyes, which are adapted to see at night, are now “day-light riddled” (line 10). Through this language, the speaker creates a sense of opposition between herself and everyone else in the poem, heightening the themes of individuality and rebellion.
A final notable use of language in these stanzas is the phrase “horny fiend,” which sharply contrasts with the religious language (about being blessed) and the confident, relaxed tone of the first two stanzas (line 3). The word “horny” is a double entendre, as it can refer to a horned animal but is also slang for being sexually aroused. This sexual connotation suggests the child’s loss of innocence in the coming stanzas—whereas here she is exposed to violence rather than to a sexual awakening, the mature slang contrasts with the child’s perspective to reveal a general theme about losing innocence. The word “fiend” similarly suggests this loss of innocence by sharply contrasting against her father’s perception of her as being “obedient” and having an “angel-mind” (line 6). A fiend is defined as “an evil spirit or demon” and is also an archaic word for the devil. This word provides a direct foil to the description of the child as an angel. It also shows that the speaker, although she is the protagonist and center of the poem, is also the villain in this story. She openly acknowledges that she is a “fiend” and that she intends to kill her prize, the owl. Taken together with the reference to a gun, the use of the word “fiend” thus imbues the first stanza with a dark, disturbing tone that foreshadows the central violent moment in the poem.
