Summary
The latter stanzas describe the aftermath of the owl shooting. The injured owl looks like a “bundle of stuff” as it falls from the beam; internal matter “dribble[s]” out of the bird’s body and lands on the straw (lines 25-26). The child moves closer to the messy, destroyed owl; she looks into its eyes in horror. The bloody owl, still alive, hobbles around the straw. The child’s father appears by her side, picks up the gun from the barn floor, and hands it to her. He instructs the speaker to shoot the owl. The speaker shoots the owl again, now killing it, and again looks at its blank eyes. Finally, the speaker learns her head upon her father’s arm and weeps at the horror of what she has done, while the early-morning sun shines through the barn.
Analysis
In stanza 5, the speaker again objectifies the owl, describing it as a “bundle of stuff” and a “wrecked thing” rather than a living creature (lines 25, 31). Here, however, this objectification arguably stems from the speaker's horror over what she is witnessing and her inability to process the damage she has inflicted, rather than from viewing the animal as unworthy of treatment as a living being. This shift in the narrator’s view of the owl is implied by the parallel shift in tone: the speaker is now horrified and in shock, rather than naïve and confident, as she was in previous stanzas. Harsh, straightforward diction like “bowels,” “cruelty,” “wrecked,” and “blood” convey this tone and the graphic nature of the scene. In fact, despite objectifying the owl, the speaker also merges her descriptions of herself and the owl—she “hopped” closer to the injured bird, just as an owl would hop in nature (line 27). The merger between the speaker and owl is further emphasized in line 30, when the speaker says the owl’s blind eyes “mirror” the speaker’s own “cruelty.” Taken together, these descriptions show the speaker’s confusion and horror by depicting the owl simultaneously as an objectified “bundle of stuff,” a concrete demonstration of the speaker’s cruelty, and a reflection of the pain inside of herself.
Harwood uses multiple literary devices in these stanzas to further convey the speaker’s horrified reaction to this traumatic event. First, she uses alliteration to reflect the speed at which the shooting’s aftermath occurs, emphasizing the narrator’s confused state of mind. The owl “dropped, and dribbled” from the beam to the floor; it is a “bundle” with its “bowels” exposed (lines 25-27). This use of alliteration causes the narrator’s description of the scene to linguistically blur, creating a sense of speed and chaos. She also uses the literary device of juxtaposition—the speaker “saw / those eyes that did not see” (lines 28/29), which contrast with the blindness that she has inflicted on the owl by shooting it. Harwood also uses the rhyme structure to emphasize the child’s shock at the reality of death. The word “clean” contrasts with the word “obscene,” demonstrating the child’s prior lack of understanding about the horror of death. “See” rhymes with “cruelty,” emphasizing how the child can now “see” and understand the gravity of what she has done. A final notable literary device is in the fifth stanza, which contains another use of a caesura, or a grammatical pause in the middle of a line of poetry: “blindly closer / I saw” (line 28). This caesura captures the speaker’s confusion in the wake of this trauma—she is “blindly” stunned by what she has done, yet can simultaneously see the consequences in front of her.
The use of the word “begun,” particularly given its placement as the final word in the poem, signifies that the child is just beginning her process of maturation and losing her innocence. The fact that the speaker is only beginning to mature is further reflected by her description of the owl as sleeping—the speaker is unable to bring herself to say, or perhaps unable to comprehend, that the owl is in fact dead. This use of “begun” is also related to the fact that the poem is told in the past tense: the speaker is looking back on a younger version of herself and narrating an important event that may suggest further growth in the future, triggering her journey into an adult understanding of the world.
