Rebellion
“Barn Owl” explores the process of a young child rebelling against her family, illustrating the consequences and limits of attempting to establish independence. In the first line, the speaker juxtaposes herself against her “household,” suggesting a desire to establish her own identity. The theme of rebellion is then expressly developed in lines 5 through 7, as the speaker gleefully contrasts herself with her father’s image of her—“Let him dream of a child / obedient, angel-mind-/ old no-sayer, robber of power / by sleep.” Here, the speaker subtly announces her intention to commit a heinous act by rejecting her father’s perception of an “obedient" child. The speaker juxtaposes what she is actually doing—sneaking out of the house as a “horny fiend” armed with a gun—with her father’s false belief that the child has an “angel-mind.” The speaker’s derisive reference to her father as an “old no-sayer” further demonstrates to the reader the child’s natural desire to test the limits of her independence and break away from her father's control. The speaker’s desire to shoot the owl epitomizes a rebellious spirit, as guns are extremely dangerous and legally limited to adult users. Indeed, the speaker engages in parental role reversal by imagining herself as more powerful and insightful than her father—he is “old” and “robbed of power / by sleep,” while the speaker is confident and in control (lines 7-8).
By contrast, the latter stanzas further develop the theme of rebellion by demonstrating the consequences of the child’s ill-advised gesture of independence. After shooting the owl, the speaker’s confidence in her rebellion abruptly dissipates. The speaker expressly admits that she is a “lonely child” and that she did not understand the gravity of her actions, having considered death “clean / and final” (lines 23-24). At the end of the poem, the child leans on her father for comfort and weeps, creating a structural symmetry with the first stanza. While she had at first mocked her father and suggested that he did not understand her, now she seeks comfort and support from him as she grapples with the trauma of the shooting. Finally, the poem suggests that this painful rebellion is only the beginning of a broader process of growing up and gaining independence. As the father commands, the speaker must “end what [she has] begun,” literally by killing the owl and metaphorically by continuing the process of growing up and reckoning with the darker side of the world (line 36).
Death
“Barn Owl” describes the speaker’s exposure to the “obscene” (repugnant or disturbing) reality of death; in doing so, it raises broader questions about mortality (line 24). It is implied that the child may have had some exposure to violence, guns, or even the death of animals before; she knows how to find and operate her father’s gun, and she is being raised near a barn in a natural setting where the death of animals is a fact of everyday existence. Despite thus having a general conception of death and weaponry, the speaker lacks a full understanding of the complex problem of mortality. In the first stanzas, the speaker describes her plan to kill the owl with naïve and disturbing cheerfulness. She feels “blessed by the sun,” indicating her joyfulness at the expectation of violence (line 2), and she describes the owl as a “prize,” failing to recognize its status as a living being and treating it as an object to be won instead (line 8). These initial descriptions downplay the meaning of mortality and create a sharp juxtaposition with the remaining stanzas.
In the poem’s climax, the fourth stanza, the child watches “afraid” as the owl falls to the ground and expressly admits the core theme of the poem: that the speaker was only a “lonely / child who believed death clean / and final” (lines 22-23). This short, straightforward statement creates a contrast with the vivid description of the owl’s death. While the speaker had believed death “clean,” in fact it is messy, as shown by unsettling diction like “bowels,” “blood,” “ruined,” and “beating his only / wing.” Similarly, the word “final” contrasts with the description in the final two stanzas—the killing of the owl is not final at all, but takes two shots and involves prolonged suffering. By building a strong contrast between the description of the owl’s shooting and the speaker’s previous belief that death was “clean and final,” Harwood thematically focuses on the physical messiness and violence inherent to death.
Morality
“Barn Owl” wrestles with the complicated question of morality in childhood. On the one hand, the speaker is undeniably cruel and vicious in choosing to shoot the owl. Her upbeat tone in the first three stanzas makes this stark cruelty even more disturbing. She describes herself as a “horny fiend” and delights in the contrast between this dark description of herself and her father’s false sense of her as “obedient” (lines 3 and 6). Furthermore, she appears immoral by associating power with violence—she is happy that her father has been “robbed of power” by sleep, while she epitomizes power through her possession of a gun (line 7). In fact, she is a sinister “judge” who plans to utilize the asymmetric power of the gun to “punish” the owl for a nonexistent crime (lines 17-18). These boisterous reflections on the power of violence firmly establish the speaker’s immoral attitude in the first three stanzas. These stanzas also carry religious undertones that emphasize the underlying theme of morality—the speaker ironically claims that she is “blessed” and contrasts herself with an “angel” (lines 2 and 6).
On the other hand, the poem also implies that the child was too young to understand how cruel she was being, and the poem concentrates on the moment in which the child feels shame and horror at her own violence. Thus, the theme of morality is closely linked to the poem’s genre of a bildungsroman—the shooting of the owl allows the speaker to mature and move toward adulthood by recognizing the difference between right and wrong. In line 30, the speaker expressly reflects on her “cruelty,” admitting that she was immoral and implicitly resolving not to do something so violent again. The poem ends with an inversion of the first scene: while the speaker was confident and felt that she was blessed by gaining the gun, in the final stanza she has dropped the gun and is weeping in the early sunlight, feeling a strong sense of remorse over her actions. This somber final scene indicates that the speaker was too innocent to recognize the consequences of her prior immorality.
In sum, “Barn Owl” can be divided into two sections in terms of the speaker’s relationship to her own morality, with the first three stanzas characterized by the child’s confidence and excitement to break away from her parents, and the fourth through seventh stanzas characterized by her horror, passivity, and shame over have shot the owl. This split structure presents an intriguing exploration into the limits of a child’s morality and the process by which one develops a moral sense over time.
