The most important theme in both Earl and Listen is loss and grief. In Earl, the loss of a seal is the main attraction and the human uses purpose and deceit to show the unavoidable loss. In Listen, the dog searched for the snow ball that his owner threw. The snowball was seen breaking apart and scattering with the other snow, but the dog did not understand what was going on, why was the ball no longer there? Any kind of loss is an unfortunate part of life which causes the person or animal who is experiencing the loss to try to process all of it in their own way and all the while be slightly confused, trying to figure out why it happens at all.
Earl, written by Louis Jenkins is a poem about people watching seals that are encircled by a killer …show more content…
In the poem Listen, a woman is seen playing in the snow with her dog in the backyard. She throws a snowball “across the backyard” (1). After she threw the snowball, the dog “ran after it to bring it back” (2). When she threw the snowball, “It broke as it fell, scattering snow over snow” (3). The dog was confused when she couldn’t find the ball that her owner had just thrown. The dog “searched in widening circles” (5). The dog did not understand where the snowball had gone, she knows that she just saw her owner throw the ball and now it is no longer there. It took her three times for her dog to give up on finding the snowball. But she did not completely give up as she “stopped once to look back” (11). In this poem, loss is demonstrated on how confusing it can be. Denial and acceptance are two of the stages of grief that a human goes through when trying to cope with a loss. Those two stages are shown in this poem. Denial was shown by the dog going “back to the center and started the circles again” (9) after looking at her owner in silence, telling her, “I know it’s here, I’ll find it” (8). In the morning, the owner was “sure that she’s forgotten” (12). But the owner is going through some grief herself when she says “I’ve had some trouble putting it out of my mind” (13). I think she is thinking of her dog having trouble with the loss of the
Earl, written by Louis Jenkins is a poem about people watching seals that are encircled by a killer …show more content…
In the poem Listen, a woman is seen playing in the snow with her dog in the backyard. She throws a snowball “across the backyard” (1). After she threw the snowball, the dog “ran after it to bring it back” (2). When she threw the snowball, “It broke as it fell, scattering snow over snow” (3). The dog was confused when she couldn’t find the ball that her owner had just thrown. The dog “searched in widening circles” (5). The dog did not understand where the snowball had gone, she knows that she just saw her owner throw the ball and now it is no longer there. It took her three times for her dog to give up on finding the snowball. But she did not completely give up as she “stopped once to look back” (11). In this poem, loss is demonstrated on how confusing it can be. Denial and acceptance are two of the stages of grief that a human goes through when trying to cope with a loss. Those two stages are shown in this poem. Denial was shown by the dog going “back to the center and started the circles again” (9) after looking at her owner in silence, telling her, “I know it’s here, I’ll find it” (8). In the morning, the owner was “sure that she’s forgotten” (12). But the owner is going through some grief herself when she says “I’ve had some trouble putting it out of my mind” (13). I think she is thinking of her dog having trouble with the loss of the