A Barred Owl" and "The History Teacher

            Young adolescent children will believe anything. They look up to adults as role models. In “A Barred Owl” written by Richard Wilbur and “The History Teacher” written by Billy Collins, the poets use similar literary devices such as juxtaposition, satire, and diction to convey contrasting outcomes.

Young children tend to get scared very easily and they are drawn to someone older to comfort them or to explain why things occur. In the poem “A Barred Owl”, a ‘hoot’ from an owl was loud enough to wake up a child. The adult then claims it was a “forest bird, asking of us …‘who cooks for you?’”. The adult makes this question rhyme with the word ‘hoot’ sound with ‘who’ and ‘you’. In this instant, the adult lies to child to calmly put her back to sleep. Wilber personifies the bird giving it human characteristics as if it could speak. Teachers are required to teach their students the truth, but the teacher in “The History Teacher”, the teacher attempts to preserve his student’s innocence. The poet juxtaposes critical time periods in history. A time known as the "Ice Age", the teacher uses different connotations to restrain from corrupting their minds. The teacher does not want his students’ heads to be filled with worldly violence. The teacher in a way ridicules important history. The teacher abuses his teaching position by misleading his students distorted information.

The teacher, when compared to the adult, are both essentially lying to their youth, but the teacher is purposely feeding them false information. While the adult quickly found a way to calmly put her child back to sleep, the teacher is premeditating other ways to in a way comically rewrite history. The teacher deliberately plans out lessons contemplating whether or not they “would believe that soldier’s in the Boer war told long, rambling stories designed to make the enemy nod off”. The history teacher’s motivation was to “protect his student’s innocence”, but what he does not realize is when...