When the poet sees the animals he feels that the deer are special “Clear on my snow-screen vision of the abnormal” and is pleased that have come into his own private dimension.
“They had happened into my dimension”
The poet thinks about the deer’s secret lives. He envies them and wishes he could join their company. The poet senses that the deer inhabit a supernatural element, and that the snow makes everything seem abnormal. The snow enhances the poets “Vision of the abnormal” and when the poet returns “back to the ordinary” he is disappointed. He also writes about the deer living secret lives that humans don’t know about,
“They planted their two or three years of secret deer hood”.
The poet regrets that he cannot communicate with the deer however much he wants to become apart of their deer hood.
“The deer had come for me”.
This is not true but the poet believes that it is.
In the poem, An Advancement of Learning, the poet, Seamus Heaney, has a phobia of rats. The poem is about a person taking a walk and chooses to go under the bridge rather than over it. He notices an animal “slime” out of the water, it is a rat. The poet ‘stares out’ the rat although he dislikes it he continues to stare. He describes the rat with its
“Back bunched and glistening, Ears plastered down on his knobbed skull,”
This makes the reader feel sick at the poet’s description of the animal. The poet describes the sighting as a battle,
“I established a dreaded
Bridgehead”
“He trained on me”
These lines are commonly associated with a war or battle so that is how we view his sighting. At the end of the poem the poet walks over the bridge, meaning he has lost this battle.
After the experience with the rat the poet takes a different route rather than the route he usually takes.
“I took the embankment path
(As always deferring
The bridge).”
This is where the poet sees the rat, on the embankment path, so he walks over the bridge instead
“Then I walked over the bridge.”
He does this because he is so terrified by the rats that he couldn’t stand to see another because it makes him sick feel sick,
“My throat sickened.”
So the only way to avoid them is to go over the bridge. The rat made the poet think about his past experiences with rats that lived in his house and yard.
“When his grey brothers scraped and fed
Behind the hen-coop in our yard,
On ceiling boards above my bed.”
The sighting is bringing back his almost forgotten childhood fear of the animal.
“Forgetting how I used to panic”
In the poem “The Arrival of the Bee Box” by Sylvia Plath we learn that the poet wants to be a bee keeper. She requests a box of bees, but when they arrive she is afraid of what they might do. This fear keeps her fascinated by the ‘buzzing’ box and thinks of what she could do with the boxed bees.
The box of bee’s cause of much anxiety because of the noise coming from the box,
“It is the noise that appals me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables,”
Because of this noise the poet can’t keep away from it, and is very curious about what is inside.
“And I can’t keep away from it.
There are no windows so I can’t see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.
I put my eye to the grid.”
The poet thinks that she will starve them because she is too afraid to let them free,
“They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.”
She the decides to set the bee’s free because she thinks that if they are hungry they will go for food;
“I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me…
…They might ignore me immediately”
The poet relates the packing of the bee’s to the African slave trade, where black Africans were herded into a ship and packed together, squashed, so they could not move.
“With the swarmy feeling of African hands,
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.”
She also relates the buzzing to an ancient Roman mob that speaks Latin, which needs to be appeased by a Caesar.
“It’s like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!
I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.”
When there is a riot the Caesar at the time would calm the mobs down. She says this because she can hear a ‘language’ spoken by the bees, the buzzing, but she can’t calm them down because she does not speak that language.
The poems “Roe-Deer” and “An Advancement of Learning” are total contrasts to each other, in “Roe-Deer” the poet admires the animal, and describes it as a supernatural creature. In “An Advancement of Learning” the poet has a lot of hate towards the rat and regards it as his enemy, but, in “The Arrival of The Bee Box” the poet has mixed feelings about the bees, she is afraid of the bees and decides to kill them, but she changes her mind and decides to set them free.
