Child and Insect
Tom O’Donnell
“Child and Insect” is a poem that demonstrates many literary strategies. It is a poem about an innocent child who captures a grasshopper on a sunny day in a meadow. When he tries to capture the grasshopper he squashes it in his infant hands. The boy feels grief next as he cries to his mother, but the grasshopper is not dead. Yet as if by magic and with a flick, comes back to life. The poem draws attention and emphasizes key emotions that are expressed in the poem. Innocence, humanity, co-existence and nature are all main themes that are explored and the poet uses sensory imagery to convey the different aspects and characteristics of the poem.
The structure of the poem is also key in uncovering the subject matter as it is broken into stanzas and helps describe the different emotions present. The poet’s use of shifting emotions as the child confronts new experiences supports the poem’s themes and function of the title.
In the first stanza of the poem we are introduced to the child’s innocence as the child tries to catch the grasshopper. The child’s shifting emotions in the poem helps convey the innocence of the child through the experiences he discovers. We see the child appears to be frustrated and excited. Frustrated, we can see in the first line of the poem, that ‘he cannot hold his hand huge enough’, excited he has snatched it from the grassblades. The poet uses alliteration here to highlight the child’s failure to fully cage the insect, enforcing one of the main themes of coexistence of nature and humanity. It could also be a metaphor for the real world where humanity cannot fully cage nature, illustrated by his power over the insect. As the boy runs back to his mother the shrieking meadow conveys terror, the whole meadow is terrifying to the child. Expressing innocence and a fear of the unknown of what lies beyond the forefront of the meadow. Kneeling by his mother’s side, the boy fears he has caused the death of the insect as he finds only a silence, broken on his palm. Where the poet uses the words ‘lies broken’ it illustrates the child’s views that the grasshopper is a fragile creature, again enforcing the theme of humanity and nature and that nature is fragile.
