"Red Fox" Commentary

RED FOX

The red fox crosses the ice
intent on none of my business.
It's winter and slim pickings.

I stand in the bushy cemetary,
pretending to watch birds,
but really watching the fox
who could care less.
She pauses on the sheer glare
of the pond. She know's I'm there,
sniffs me in the wind at her shoulder.
If I had a gun or dog
or raw heart, she'd smell it.
She didn't get this smart for nothing.

She's a lean vixen. I can see
the ribs, the sly
trickster's eyes, filled with longing
and desperation, the skinny
feet, adept at lies.

Why encourage the notion
of virtuous poverty?

It's only an excuse
for zero charity.
Hunger corrupts, and absolute hunger
corrupts absolutely,
or almost. Of course there are mothers,
squeezing thier breasts
dry, pawning their bodies,
shedding teeth for their children,
or that's our fond belief.
But remember - Hansel
and Gretel were dumped in the forest
because their parents were starving.
Sauve qui peut. To survive we'd all turn thief

and rascal, or so says the fox,
with her coat or an elegant scoundrel,
her white knife of a smile,
who knows just where she's going:

to steal something
that doesn't belong to her -
some chicken, or one more chance,
or other life.

Commentary:

In Atwood's "Red Fox" she uses the conceit, compairing a hungry person to a fox, and imagery in order to demonstrate how poverty can cause people to make bad and desperate decisions.
Comparing a human to fox connotes that the human is sly, coniving, and a trickster. Atwood uses this conceit to demonstrate that this is what people become when they are impoverished and starving. She says, "To survive we'd all turn thief and rascal, or so says the fox," which shows how people will do whatever it takes to survive such as food, to do so. She says, "Hunger corrupts" then goes on to say "to steal somethign that doesn't belong to her - some chicken." It seems as if she is justifying the fox-like actions that humans take to survive. Using the word "corrupts" implies that the hunger takes over and makes people lose control of their inhibitions and set aside their morals to survive. Another example of people setting aside their morals for survival is when she states, "mothers...pawning their bodies."
The imagery in the poem suggests starvation, and provides reasoning as to why people are becoming sly and coniving like foxes. She says, "She's a lean vixen. I can see the ribs, the sly trickster's eyes, ... the skinny feet." These images describe the body of a fox as well as the body of a starving person, which exemplifies Atwood's conceit throughout the poem. Also, Atwood says, "Of course there are mothers, squeezing their breasts dry, pawning their bodies, shedding teeth for their children," which demonstrates the desperate measures to which a mother would turn to for her survival and the suvival of her children.

"From the Frontier of Writing" by Seamus Heaney

FROM THE FRONTIER OF WRITING

The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face

towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover

and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration--

a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you'd passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road

past armor-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

Commentary:

In Seamus Heaney's From the Frontier of Writing, Heaney uses images of war to develope the conceit of comparing the process of a writer getting his or her work read by someone else to the frontier of a war battlefield.

The first three stanzas of the poem express the speaker's feeling when his he gives his work to someone to be read and critiqued. He uses the image of someone driving through or past the frontier to represent how he feels when his work is being read. He says "when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect its make and number and, as one bends his face towards your window," which is a metaphor to how the reader reads the work. The reader gets the work and looks closely at it to pick it apart and finding literal and metaphoric meanings, as do the troops at the frontier of a battlefield when passersby come about. He also uses the image of hawks when he says, "the marksman training down out of the sun upon you like a hawk." This quotation compares critics to hawks, which implies that critics are feared creatures who swoop down and kill their prey, which are poems and writers.

This war imagery also makes it seem as if the speaker views critics as bad people because he says "eyeing with intent," meaning that the critics have an ulterior motive for reading the work because the word "eyeing" connotes suspicion and evilness, while the word "intent" means reason and motive. He also says "everything is pure interrogation." Interrogation is something viewed as annoying, menacing, and unwanted. He feels that critics interrogate a work as frontier troops interrogate those passing through.