By Means Of Comparison, Consider the Interest Shown of Living Creatures in The Fox on the Point of Death, The Twa Corbies and To a Mouse

English Literature – Pre-1914 Poetry - Comparative

By Means Of Comparison, Consider the Interest Shown of Living Creatures in Any Three of the Poems Studied

“The Twa Corbies” is by an anonymous poet, and will have been spread by word of mouth. This means that it was meant to be easily remembered and sung. This poem uses a lot of regional dialect to convey its message, and to help the peasants to whom it was being recited to understand. The rhymes are in couplets which make it easier to remember and pass on, but the poem is generally in the form of a ballad.

The poem is about a “new-slain knight”, and is told by a man listening into the conversation of two ravens with anthropomorphic features. A major part of the poem is the dyke where the knight lays, and it plays multiple roles in the poem. For the birds, it is a diner, where they can get their food from, for the lady and her new “mate”, it is a hiding place, and for the knight, it is his grave.

The word “mate” tells us that although the ravens are talking among each other, they are still birds that take mates and not partners. The birds also plan to use every part of the knight’s body, apart from his bones. They say that they will “pike out his bonny blue e’en” and make their nest with his hair.

Although many talk about the disappearance of this knight only a few know where he is: the two ravens, “his hawk, his hound and his lady fair” and now the poet. It is natural for these characters to know, apart from his “lady fair”. This makes us aware of the fact that the knight’s death was a murder, and was committed by his own wife.

There are a more clues that tell us that the knight was not ready to die naturally, the fact that he has “gowden hair” and “bonny blue e’en” suggests youth. In the sentence, “so we may mak our dinner sweet”, the word “so” is directly implicating the knight’s wife to the murder as it is by her action that the ravens can eat.

One of the most effective couplets in the poem is the last one, “O’er his white banes, when they are bare, the wind sall blaw for evermair”. This shows the loneliness of death and how the knight ...

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Another poem written with a Scots dialect is Robert Burns’ “To a Mouse”; this poem is told by a poor Scottish farmer, when he comes across a mouse’s home for the winter. Like the “corbies”, the mouse is a thief, as it steals the farmer’s corn, but the farmer says “A daimen-icker in a thrave. ‘S a sma' request:” (An occasional ear of corn is a small request). This shows the farmer showing sympathy to the mouse. The word “request” implies that the mouse has asked the farmer’s permission to eat the corn, when it has just eaten it.

The farmer seems to think that the mouse and he are very similar, and even calls it his “poor, earth-born companion, an' fellow-mortal!” This is showing how both the farmer and the mouse were both born on the same planet, and so they should have equal right over it.

The farmer even apologises for mankind’s behaviour to animals such as the mouse, whereas in “The Twa Corbies”, the ravens do not care about man’s behaviour, as long as they get a good meal from it.

Both the mouse in “To a Mouse” and the knight in “The Twa Corbies” are hidden until something finds them. In “To a Mouse”, the farmer uncovers the mouse whilst he is ploughing his corn fields, and in “The Twa Corbies”, the knight is discovered by one of the crows, who subsequently tells the other of the pair.

The farmer destroys the mouse’s home when he uncovers it and he then realises it will probably die. The poem is set in the winter, where there is no grass to build a new nest and the winter winds will cause it to die.

The penultimate stanza also shows a connection between the famer and the mouse as the farmer says that “The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley,” (The best schemes of Mice and Men, often go awry). The phrase “Mice an’ Men” implies that both mice and men’s plans can easily go wrong. In this poem, many plans and schemes are going wrong whilst in “The Twa Corbies”, the raven’s dining plan, and the knight’s lady’s plan to kill him, went well.

Both “The Twa Corbies” and “To a Mouse” have similar final stanzas which give a lasting impact on the reader. “The Twa Corbies” is about how no one will ever find the dead knight, whilst in “To a Mouse”, the last stanza states that even though the mouse’s future looks bleak, it is still lucky compared to the farmer who has to look back at memories he would rather forget, and can think forward to things that could happen. As Burns was 26 when he wrote this, it is unusual for a man of his age to be thinking so fatalistically.

Another poem in which an animal is near to death is “The Fox on the Point of Death” by John Gay. This poem tells the tale of a fox, near death, giving advice to his sons about mistakes he has learnt in life. The fox, like the two ravens in “The Twa Corbies”, displays anthropomorphic features, such as the ability to talk. The poem is also written in rhyming couplets, whilst juxtaposition plays a part in this poem. In the couplets one line is compared with the following line. The lines “Does not the hound betray our pace, and gins and guns destroy our race” compares the hunting by dogs with the hunting using guns and traps.

The fox begins hallucinating about all the chickens, turkeys and geese he has killed for food, and tells his sons that “we, like harmless sheep, should feed”, or that they should eat grass rather than eat other living things.

When the dying fox tells his sons about his hallucinations they “lick their lips in vain”, thereby showing that the sons do not care about their father’s message, and are only there as they have to. The dying fox is surrounded by his family on his deathbed, unlike the knight in “The Twa Corbies” or the mouse in “To a Mouse”.

The lines “Does not the hound betray our pace, and gins and guns destroy our race” tell us of the hardships of being a fox, constantly being hunted by dogs and guns and traps alike. Similarly, the mouse in “To a Mouse” is going through a hardship of its own, as its home has gone, and it is likely that the mouse will not survive the winter.

The fox then goes on to tells his sons that many of them will not reach the age he has because of the “gins and guns”. The fox knows he is lucky to have avoided capture all his life and die a natural death, but the fox is also unhappy and thinks that death will end his unhappiness.

The poem is a fable, as it involves using animals to give a moral to its readers, usually using anthropomorphism. In this poem, the moral is simply summed up in one line, “And, the good name you lost, redeem”. This is basically saying that if someone loses their credibility, they should try to save their trustworthiness, in any way possible.

The poem then goes on to give a darker message that “infamy” has made sure that foxes are always seen as cruel and barbaric, like the ravens in “The Twa Corbies”. The dying fox says that even if they foxes were to be as kind as sheep, whenever something wrong happened, foxes would always be blamed for the bad deed.

After reflecting on what he has just said, the fox decides that nothing can be done to save the creature, and hears a hen. He sends off his sons to go for a meal, and asks that they bring him one back. This is showing that although the fox had a change of mind, he quickly returns to his ‘fox mindset’ and wants a meal. This is similar to “The Twa Corbies” where although the ravens think about the gruesomeness of the knight’s demise, they still want to eat him.

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