Sketches A Bird, Now Extinct Poem Comparison

Human and nature have a mutual relationship. Thank to nature, human get food and other resources that are necessary for their existence. Human gradually found ways to improve nature to serve their purposes. However, due to the greed of human, nature has been destroyed at a steady speed. People now cut down trees, dispose waste and smoke into the environment, capture animals to extinction for their benefits. There have been a lot of calls for respecting and protecting nature. The poems “The Author of American Ornithology Sketches a Bird, Now Extinct” by David Wagoner and “Moss Gathering”, by Theodore Roethke in A Book of Luminous Thing, do a good job representing this in their poems. They are similar in the way that they involve both human and
In the poem by David Wagoner, nature is indicated through the “ivory-billed woodpecker, as big as a crow”. The poor bird is the target of so- called “good intentions” as the poet states: “Must gather their flocks around them with a rifle. And make them live forever inside books”. To serve the scientific aim, the bird was shot at its wing and then captured. It was deprived from its own freedom. That is why it “began to cry like a baby”. The bird tried to be set free with its relentless efforts “wailing and squealing”. The call of nature, of freedom continuously urged it to escape from its piteous situation as described in the poem: “And the bird clinging beside a hole in the wall. Clear through to already-splintered weatherboards. And the sky beyond. While he tied one of its legs. To a table leg, it started wailing again.” The hunter witnessed all the painfulness that the pathetic animal was suffering, but he did nothing and ignored. He only wanted to preserve the eternal image of the bird to “make them live forever inside books”. He just wanted to keeps it alive in mind, not in
In the first poem, the hunter showed no sympathy for the bird he had captured. Despite all of its mournful cries, its vain attempts to free back to nature, he was indifferent and apathetic. He only concentrated on his sole purpose “dew and tinted on fine vellum”. The theory of the bird grabbed more his attention than the will and emotion of the actual bird. Though in the last sentence, the speaker showed some empathy for the bird: “He watched it die, he said, with great regret.” How ironic! He sat there and “watched it die”. The poet uses the word “watch” to show the satire on the speaker’s “regret”. Was he regret because he kept the bird as his prisoner and caused its passing or was he remorseful since he lost his