Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
The speaker is unidentified but is a writer with a fondness for nature. This naturally makes it easy to assume the speaker is a persona of the poet herself.
Form and Meter
Free verse without any strict observance of form or meter.
Metaphors and Similes
The fox responds to the poet’s assertion of the “difference” between humans and animals with the metaphor: “You fuss over life with your clever words, mulling and chewing on its meaning.”
Alliteration and Assonance
The opening line of the poem builds upon alliteration with words beginning with the letter “L”: “He was lying under a tree, licking up the shade.”
Irony
The point that the fox is making is that humans spend too much think overthinking daily existence. One form of overthinking is writing poetry. So, in essence, this is a poem that suggests that writing poetry is making “a fuss over life” which is profoundly ironic.
Genre
Nature Poetry/Dialogue
Setting
An unknown woodsy area populated by wild animals, but which is accessible to regular human traffic.
Tone
Light-hearted, slightly comic but also philosophical and ironic.
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: the Speaker. Antagonist: The fox, but antagonist in this case is not intended to be synonymous with villain. This poem presents an excellent example of how antagonist is merely a term implying an oppositional status to the protagonist rather than reducing the relationship to a hero/villain dynamic.
Major Conflict
The conflict in the poem is expressed near the end when the speaker observes, somewhat cryptically, that her bookmarks “the difference between” humans and animals.
Climax
The climax is actually anticlimactic with the speaker’s simple expression of “Oh!” in response to the fox’s criticism of human beings that they spend too much time thinking about life instead of instinctively living it.
Foreshadowing
N/A
Understatement
The entire poem is an exercise in understatement. The speaker engages in a conversation with a fox without demonstrating the slightest surprise that the fox is capable of speech.
Allusions
The reference by the speaker to “my book” is an allusion to the poet which further serves to implicate the speaker as being a projection of herself.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
“The hunt is good for the fox” is an example of synecdoche in which the fan of fox hunting is suggesting that the “sport” is beneficial to all foxes, not just one in particular.
Personification
The entire poem is an example as the fox is given human attributes from the power of the speech to gossiping to psychological analysis.
Hyperbole
The fox builds upon the author’s cryptically ambiguous assertion that her book represents the difference between humans and animals by suggesting that the difference lies entirely in the way humans “fuss over life with your clever words.” This is certainly a hyperbolic view on the issue of what separates humans from animals.
Onomatopoeia
N/A
