Thoughts in a Zoo Literary Elements

The speaker is an anonymous visitor to the zoo who mostly like represents the persona of the poet himself. He presents a philosophical perspective that is capable of seeing a connection between caged animals and humanity.

Free-verse which closely approximates iambic pentameter constructed as a near-sonnet.

Metaphor: “They in their cruel traps, and we in ours”
Simile: “Some, like the snake, with changeless slothful eye”

Repetition of "S" words and sounds: “Some, like the snake, with changeless slothful eye, / Stir not, but sleep and smoulder”

The final line poses an ironic rhetorical question that asks whether the animals in cages are more or less wretched than uncaged humanity.

Philosophical verse

Although not explicitly stated in the text, it is importantly contextually to note that this poem was written at a time before zoos sought to replicate natural habitats for their animals. Thus, the zoo in which the speaker finds himself is one in which every animal is literally on display behind bars in a cage likely with cement floors.

The tone is contemplative in its reflection of the similarity between caged animals in the zoo and the various metaphorical societal cages which serve to imprison human beings.

The philosophical nature of the poem is expressed through the abstraction of its villain. The protagonist of the story is the anonymous speaker .

The conflict of the poem is revealed in its final line in which the speaker ponders whether it is preferable to see the bars that cage you or to not even be aware that you are in a cage at all.

The climax of the poem arrives in the final lines with the unexpected query by the speaker asking whether humans might actually live in more wretched conditions than zoo animals locked behind bars in cages.

The climactic question is foreshadowed early in the poem in the imagery in which the speaker suggests the only real difference between the animals and humans begins is that human “cages have a larger range.”

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The mole’s instinct to burrow underground is used as imagery which alludes to a tendency in some humans to willingly blind themselves to the reality of their conditions.

The term “stifling flesh” is a metonym referring to the entire anatomical structure of the human body.

The entire poem is built upon personification with specific individual examples including the image of zoo creatures “Commiserating each the other’s woe” in the way that humans do.

Hyperbole is utilized to draw the parallel between the conditions of the animals and the conditions of humans: “Man could but little proffer in exchange / Save that his cages have a larger range.”

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