A simile

In the Ted Hughes poem "The Owl", the speaker seems to be showing "his world" to another person - perhaps a child, perhaps a lover, perhaps a wife. The subject who the speaker is addressing "takes it all in with incredulous joy, like a mother handed her new baby by the midwife." 

Students have spent a good deal of time working on this poem, and almost without fail when we reach this simile they identify "happiness" as the emotion the mother is feeling. I love group work for this reason: when I'm working with four students I can say, emphatically, "OK, yes happiness, but what else might a new mother be feeling when she's handed her baby?" 

Always, at least one person in the group is able to immediately pick up on the fact that the mother is feeling overwhelmed, perhaps fearful, perhaps just now realising the responsibility involved in having a child... 

Working with this simile has been a testament to the importance of a) reading as a social activity, where others' ideas and knowledge inform your own reading, and b) the importance of talk as a tool to understand poetry. Our initial understanding is so rarely the fullest one.

The Owl by Ted Hughes

I saw my world again through your eyes
As I would see it again through your children's eyes.
Through your eyes it was foreign.
Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens,
A mystery of peculiar lore and doings.
Anything wild, on legs, in your eyes
Emerged at a point of exclamation
As if it had appeared to dinner guests
In the middle of the table. Common mallards
Were artefacts of some unearthliness,
Their wooings were a hypnagogic film
Unreeled by the river. Impossible
To comprehend the comfort of their feet
In the freezing water. You were a camera
Recording reflections you could not fathom.
I made my world perform its utmost for you.
You took it all in with an incredulous joy
Like a mother handed her new baby
By the midwife. Your frenzy made me giddy.
It woke up my dumb, ecstatic boyhood
Of fifteen years before. My masterpiece
Came that black night on the Grantchester road.
I sucked the throaty thin woe of a rabbit
Out of my wetted knuckle, by a copse
Where a tawny owl was enquiring.
Suddenly it swooped up, splaying its pinions
Into my face, taking me for a post.

By the way, this morning during worship at Meeting I was thinking about this poem and how much it reflects my feelings as a literature teacher to students who speak English as a second language. I do feel, when I bring literature that I love into the classroom, from my culture, that "I made my world perform its utmost for you"; I want them to respond with incredulous joy, and when they do react with the wonder and amazement of the "you" in this poem, their "frenzy" makes me "giddy". 

There are also elements of English class that are, for some students, "impossible to comprehend", like the feet of a mallard not freezing in the freezing water of winter. For example, H. finds it "impossible to comprehend" how we are supposed to find meaning in the placement of a comma. S. thinks that finding meaning in the repetition of o or a sounds in a line is silly. 

I have to say, I am inclined to agree with them sometimes. When you analyse poetry or prose for sound devices, you have to enter an alternate state of mind, a sort of "hypnogogic" half-dream in which everything is allowed to carry meaning. Once you're there, it's a liberating place to be, but when considered cold, many literary devices seem like things invented by bored scholars in towers, which they probably are.

If you're like our students, you're wondering what pinions are: 

Imagine having this bad boy fly up into your face! The pinions are the extremities of the wings.