Death Of A Toad By Richard Wilbur Poem

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“One does not use poetry for its major purposes, as a means to organize oneself and the world, until one’s world somehow gets out of hand.” This was Richard Wilbur’s response when someone asked him about fighting in World War II and how it changed him. Richard Wilbur is a famous modern day poet who won two Pulitzer Prizes for two of his collections of poems. He was the second poet laureate of the United States. Richard Wilbur fought as a combat soldier in World War II which changed his outlook on life and led to him having a more serious and dark tone in his poetry. Wilbur was born on March 1, 1921 in New York City. Throughout his childhood he lived in New York with his parents in a wealthy neighborhood. He attended private school as a kid, …show more content…
Wilbur wrote this poem about a toad getting run over by a power mower and then all of the things seen after that happened. In this poem Wilbur used detailed description to describe the things he sees after the toad was killed. The detailed description had a very serious and dark tone. For instance in the second line it states, “Chewed and clipped off a leg.” This detailed description of the toad getting run over by the power mower seems very dark and a little out of the ordinary because he uses personification to say that the mower chewed off the toad’s leg. At the end of the poem it says, “In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear To watch across the castrate lawn.” In these lines of the poem, Wilbur is describing how the toad is lying in the garden dead, but it’s eyes are still open, and they seem to be staring across the lawn. This sets a very dark and serious tone to the poem because he is describing how a toad that has been brutally killed is staring across the lawn. Richard Wilbur fighting in World War II completely altered his writing and led to him writing in a very dark and serious tone and it is seen all throughout this poem. The words he uses to describe what is happening such as, “drowning” and “day dwindles” and “death” are all examples of the diction that Wilbur uses throughout the poem that creates a very dark tone for the reader. A boy from New York going to private school and living with his family would not choose to write in this dark tone but a boy who fought in a war would write in this way. This poem not only has a dark tone due to the war changing Wilbur but it also may be a description of what he saw in the war. Wilbur uses the metaphor of the death of a toad to replace the sights that he saw of real humans dying in the war. He uses this dark tone because he is describing how when someone would die in the war he

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