Response essay 3

8/7/2019 Response essay 3

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Williamaye A. Jones

LIT 241.001

Prof. Merritt Moseley

July 28, 2008

Rhetorical Analysis to Levines Animals Are Passing From Our Lives

Philip Levines title, Animals Are Passing From Our Lives, makes one think the poem will be

told from a persons point of viewthat they may be grieving for some pet that has died, giving

a false tone of sweet melancholia. However, this modern poem is told from a pigs perspective

a pig who is about to be slaughtered and these are its thoughts as it faces its oncoming demise.

The title is ironic and sets the tone for the poem because people are the cause of why Animals

Are Passing From Our Lives.

The poem opens on an upbeat note in the first quatrain. The first two linesIts

wonderful how I jog / on four honed-down ivory toes /show that this is an animal speaking.

And the animal continues to admire itself in the following two linesmy massive buttocks

slipping / like oiled parts with each light step. / However, we do not know for sure that the

animal is a pig until line 11: the snouts drool on the marble (emphasis added).

As we progress through the poem, the tone becomes gloomy as the pig tells its story. The

imagery is poignant for we can see what will soon befall the pig. Im to market. I can smell / the

sour, grooved block, I can smell / the blade that opens the hole / and the pudgy white fingers /

that shake out the intestines / like a hankie. / (Lines 510.) The end of line 10 shows another

change as the image dissolves into a dream where pigs suffer and consumers wont acknowledge


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them, changing again to the boy who believes the pig will behave disgracefully, and finally

ending in defiance with the pig saying, No. Not this pig. (Line 24.)

In addressing his audience, the pig is trying to show his equality with people. The

informal tone places the pig on equal footing with people so he can be understood, as if he were

speaking to the common man. The allusion is that the pig is the common man. One could switch

places with the pig and feel the hopelessness of facing the same existence, which is non-

existence. The pig is speaking to anyone who might listen. Its almost as if his executioner (the

butcher) has asked the pig if he has any last words and the pig replies through this poem. The use

of a pig is also illuminating, for the normal connotation of pig is something dirty or gluttonous.

The poet personifies the pig with his choice of words in the second and third quatrains: I

can smell/ In my dreams He wants us to see the pig as a living thingto sympathize. Yet,

in the fourth quatrainsuffering the consumers / who wont meet their steady eyes / (lines 13

14)is it sympathy the consumers feel or guilt? The next line, for fear they could see, alludes

to the fact that they could actually be in the same place as the pigthe drudgery of their

existence.

The poet refers to the bravery or stoicism that the pig will show upon facing death by

saying what he will not do (lines 1724). The pig will not turn into a beast, for only the inhuman

would act like a beast. The pig will not die as they expect him to, squealing and shitting upon the

floor. This is a familiar allusion as we all fear death, yet we hope when death comes calling that

we die with dignity. Also ironic, since when the human body dies it lets out a final gasp and the

bowels loosen.

This poem strives to humanize animalspossibly trying to persuade people not to

slaughter animals or maybe just to know that animals (people) will not always react as expected.


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How will one react when put in a situation not of their choosing? Quite possibly, it alludes to the

timesthe era of manufacturinghow people went about the daily grind of barely eking out a

living. And the measure of a man is how he faces that existence, without fear or squealing and

shitting like a pig? The poem progressed from light to dark, yet its final message is one of

triumph: be brave in the face of lifes adversity.

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Response essay 3