Poetry Essay Questions

What does the style of the poem do to promote its meaning?

The poem is written in free verse. Its tone is informal, light; it is structured informally and playfully. As critic Maureen Mills writes, the free verse form allows "the sense of liberation of thought and expression" and "the natural, colloquial diction, almost intimate and companionable, encourages trust as Moore leads the reader into territories in which the familiar is viewed in an uncommon way." She has sound-devices but they are slight, subtle; the internal, half-rhyme holds images together, providing an energetic and fresh set of images and feelings. Overall, the form promotes the sort of poetry Moore is saying she wants: something authentic, not simply conforming to tradition for tradition's sake.

How does Moore employ humor in this work?

This poem has a serious message, of course, but it does not mean that the images Moore chooses aren't steeped in humor and irony. Her lines are amusing, as is her dry tone. The animals she describes are engaged in instinctual, playful activities, while the people who are described include a sports fan, a mathematician who deals with one of the "softer" disciplines, and of course the critic, who feels the perpetual twitch as if it were a flea. The garden of poetry has a toad in it, that classically ugly creature with slimy skin and warts.

What is "genuine" poetry based on?

Genuine poetry is not rooted in the abstract, the artificial, the tendentious. It comes from the everyday, the visceral and the earthy. As critic Charles Altieri writes, "we would have to say that the point of the poem is to show that we must conceive the genuine in poetry in terms of forces, rather than of things or images. Poetry must be abstract in order to focus attention on the genuine concreteness of its processes that tend to be subsumed under the narcissistic substitutes imposed upon them when we create scenic contexts and thematic interpretations." It has to make the eyes dilate, the hair rise. It has to be a horse rolling, an elephant pushing. It has to be a toad, and it has to be raw.