Similarities Between Collins And Richard Wilbur

Innocence is a state of being, so easily lost and impossible to obtain. Billy Collins and Richard Wilbur portray worlds of evil and darkness through creative metaphors and allusions, ironic statements, and pathetic fallacies. Both poets employ imagery through metaphors to display the settings of the poems, and work in allusions to describe the happenings throughout the stories told in these poems. The adults strive to protect the innocence of the children within these two poems, and they must make the choice to lie in order to accomplish that. Although the parents of the child in A Barred Owl seem to be successful in their attempt at shielding the dark truth from their daughter, the teacher in the second poem does not appear to be as triumphant. Irony expresses the attempt to guard the children in The History Teacher from the traumatic past, while A Barred Owl allows its …show more content…
A Barred Owl portrays a child, afraid of the dark, wind, and noises of the night, and her parent’s comforting her with a little while lie. The girl’s parents convince her that there is nothing to be afraid of, and ease her back to sleep with that small comfort. In lines 10-12, when the narrator illustrates with powerful allusions, the amount of reality that is being hidden from the child, the readers are given an example of how sometimes, knowing the truth can do more damage than good. “The warping night air having brought the boom of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,” (1-2) is an example of the pathetic fallacy Wilbur applies to creatively draw the reader in and convey to the reader what the child fears. The description of the sound of the wind, as if the wind is speaking, lends an eerie tone to the poem at the beginning, which is then suppressed by the parents convincing lie that there is nothing to fear. Although lying can backfire, it can sometimes protect someone from the darker