Gwen Harwood's "Barn Owl"
...tanzas, but some o f these stanzas are linked thorugh Enjambment, making three groups. The first group of theree stanzas tells us how she crept to the barn to shoot the owl, and the second group of three tells us of the horrible, painful, "obscene" death of the owl. The final Stanza tells us of the girl killing the owl to end its misery and shows the child anguished and repentant for the senseless evil that she has inflicted on nature. One of the conventions used in the poem is that of using metaphors. The girl is the subject fio a few metaphors, for example, in the first stanza she is a "horny fiend," and then in the later stanzas a "master of life and death... a judge." Note that these all occur in the first group of stAnzas, before the girl has actually shot the bird. In the fourth stanzaq, the girl is now a "lonely child," who wasn;t prepared for the sight of death that occurred. The owl itself becomes an "obscene bundle of stuff," and bundle of blood, feathers and flesh as opposed to a livng thing. The style, grouping of stanzas and the use of metaphors in the poem convey the meaning well. What Gerwn Harwood wants to show us is that senseless killing is wrong. A young disillusioned child disobeys her father and takes the gun to shoot an owl, and easy target, not long into its sleep Period for the day. An owl is not a pest, neither is it needed for food, so the turning of life into a "wrecked thing." is villified. The girl is shown to have learnt a valuable lesson from her father when he comes in and finds her there, and is repentant, unlikely to ever do something like that again. This is one memory that will never be erased from the girl's memory: It is a significant event: the loss of inno...