Summary
In the third stanza, the speaker enters the barn and sees the owl sleeping on a beam. Because it is nocturnal, the owl rests during the day and awaits the next night’s hunting period. The speaker holds her breath, anticipating shooting the bird. She notices the smell of urine in the barn's hay. She describes herself as a “master of life and death” and as a judge with the power to exact a punishment on the owl (line 16). In the fourth stanza, the speaker shoots the owl. She watches it sway and beat its wing as it falls from the beam. Suddenly, the speaker feels afraid. She had not realized that death was messy, violent, and disgusting.
Analysis
The symbolic imagery of night as contrasted with day continues into this stanza. The owl requires darkness to hunt, so during the day it sleeps “light’s useless time away” (line 13). By describing the owl as sleeping innocently, the speaker creates a parallel between the owl and her parents. Both are sleeping and peaceful, unaware of the speaker’s dark intentions. This creates a sense of power for the speaker. While the owl thinks that the light is “useless,” the speaker plans to use the light in the barn to carry out her plan, heightening her sense of power over the owl. By creating this parallel between the owl and her parents, the speaker builds on the sense of rebellion by juxtaposing herself with the other figures in the poem, all of whom (the parents and the owl together) are depicted as antagonists against whom the speaker rallies.
This sense of power is further developed through the speaker’s metaphorical description of herself as a “master” and a “judge.” The child uses this language of power and authority to represent her possession of the gun. As the all-powerful “judge,” she plans to use the gun to “punish” the owl—this stark, violent word foreshadows the violence to come in the following stanzas. This line also uses synecdoche, as the child describes her act as punishing “beak and claw” rather than the owl as a full being. This synecdoche reflects how the speaker does not fully comprehend that the owl is a living being, seeing it instead as an object to be destroyed; thus, the speaker refers to the owl only through its constituent parts. Additionally, the owl’s beak and claws are not physical features present in humans (as opposed to its eyes, for example), further illustrating how the child sees the owl as different from humans—lesser, and therefore worthy of destruction.
Despite the bravado of the speaker’s tone in stanzas one through three, lines 13 and 14 suggest that the speaker is more nervous than she has explicitly disclosed. Although the speaker describes herself as a “judge,” she is a “wisp-haired judge.” “Wisp-haired” directly refers to the speaker’s thin hair, but “wisp” also means “a small, thin person, typically a child” (Oxford Dictionary). This description thus subtly emphasizes the speaker’s innocence, contrasting with her bold description of herself as an all-powerful master and judge over life and death. Additionally, prior to shooting the owl, she holds her breath, indicating that she is anticipating the monumental act she is about to commit.
These stanzas also use specific, concrete details to juxtapose the speaker’s state of mind against the action occurring in the poem. The scent of urine, which is an unappealing reality of life, foreshadows the child’s shock at the disgusting reality of an animal being shot and violently dying. When the speaker finally shoots the owl at the beginning of stanza four—marking a dramatic tone shift in the poem—the line again uses concrete language, and is devoid of detail or figurative language. The line simply begins: “My first shot struck” (19). Harwood again employs a caesura here, creating a pause in the middle of the line that reflects the pause between the child shooting the owl and the injured owl falling to the floor: “My first shot struck. He swayed…” (line 19).
Building on this monumental moment, which is described in spare detail, Line 21 creates a sharp transition in the tone and mood of the poem. While the tone in the first three stanzas was triumphant, confident, and self-satisfied, the tone for the remainder of the poem becomes fearful and remorseful. Like the owl, the gun falls to the floor, symbolizing this transition: while the child once confidently hoisted the gun, representing her perceived power, the gun has now fallen, rendering the child literally and metaphorically defenseless. The curtain is pulled back—the powerful “judge” in stanza three is revealed as a “lonely / child” in stanza four (lines 22-23). In this stanza, the speaker reflects on her core realization, which is related to the poem’s central theme of losing innocence: she thought death was “clean and final,” not “obscene” as the graphic death of the owl demonstrates (lines 23-24). As these lines expressly state, the child was too naïve to realize the gravity of killing the owl, but she is now horrifically exposed to death.
