“There are many of us.” It's a common occurrence; unfortunate, but it happens. Not something to get too excited over.
The use of the term “feathers” in this poem has two meanings: the first is to associate the woman with the owl. The second meaning is more complex.
|Feathers are often used to attract attention; they are symbolic of the woman's beauty. This implies that the woman was murdered by a man with a sexual motivation because she is attractive. This again places no blame on her killer, but more blames her for “inviting” the killer by being attractive.
Feathered heart: has a feminine shape. An upside-down heart has a shape similar to that of a woman's behind. A feathered heart therefore represents an attractive woman's body. Later a killer's heart is mentioned; it is not feathered as he does not make an effort to make himself more attractive.
Next, the mouth and hands are mentioned. The mouth, a chisel, and her hands are crimes unto themselves, the crimes performed by others. This places obvious blame on the woman. The chisel creates the imagery of the woman carving something; this means she is taking action and is influencing the situation. The mouth and hands can both be used as sexual devices. This again implies that the woman's death is a result of her own doing for drawing the killer to her.
In the next stanza, the woman's heart is in the forest “talking of death which is monotonous”. This again shows that the woman's plight is not one to be sympathized with. She explains that her dialogue is monotonous because “though there are many ways of dying there is only on death song, the colour of mist: it says Why Why” there is no punctuation at the end of the stanza; the “Why Why” gives the impression of one calling out for someone or something unknown. The change in meter uses the pattern of an owl calling through the woods. An owl's hooting is commonly considered to be an expression of loneliness; its meaning is however misunderstood. The imagery of the mist immediately before the owl's hooting foreshadows the misinterpretation of the owl's hooting; mist refracts light and often distorts images, making it difficult to see what lies just beyond the mist. While the owl's hooting appears to be random and thoughtless, it is in fact entirely intentional and used to communicate with its environment. The “death song” is the sound made by the dead person, a kind of rhythmic mantra. The woman solemnly asks why she has died over and over because she does not understand why the man did this to her. This is the first indication by the writer that she sympathizes with the woman in the poem. This is essential to the main idea of the poem; it finally depicts the woman in a positive or compassionate light.
This idea is reinforced in the next stanza when the heart of the woman explains that it has no desire for revenge or even expiation; it wants to know “how”. “How I was lost,” which is repeated. This again is a repetition of a question to which the woman's heart does not know the answer, about what happened to her which killed her. She understands where it happened, when it happened and what happened. But she does not understand who her assailant was, or why he did what he did, or how she became one of the unlucky people to suffer this fate. Each of these questions is repeated in their respective stanzas: who, why and how.
The final three stanzas switch perspective to that of a killer. Not necessarily the one who killed the woman, but the poem relates the two of them through the metaphor of the lost heart.
The man's heart is the heart of a murderer-to-be. He is still innocent and has never contemplated murder before. His lost heart knows that he will become a murderer, but the man himself does not.
The next stanza is by far the shortest. This is for the effect of emphasis. This is the first mention of a male in the poem.
In the final stanza, the man's heart is explaining how the rapist inside the man will grow. The significance of the final three stanzas is to explain that the woman was violated by a man. It also gives the first clues as to why; this poem has to be read more than once in order to properly be understood, as the stanzas have to be re-ordered to make sense.
In conclusion, this poem is about womens' struggle for human dignity. It does so by making a comment on how society affects the portrayal of women to make them sexualized to men. As a result there are cases such as this, in which the woman is violated and killed by a man, and an innocent man becomes a rapist. The fact that iy happens at all is the problem and point of this poem.