The Jaguar by Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes, a modern English poet, wrote various poems especially about animal’s imageries. One of his poems is “The Jaguar” which was inspired by a trip to the zoo. In this poem Ted Hughes describes the animals in the zoo and their different behaviour and attitudes to entrapment in their cages. He gives a series of vivid imageries in nearly every line and this makes it easy for us the readers to picture the scene.
The poem opens with a simple depressing and straight forward description of the apes “yawning” and adoring their fleas. By using long voweled words such as ‘yawn’ and ‘adore’ the poet manages to create a slow rhythm that creates two powerful images which suggest that the apes have nothing urgent to do, and so feel sleepy and tired due to the heat of the “sun”. I think that this line shows the monotonous and lazy behaviour of everyday life in the zoo. In the next cage the parrots are shrieking as they walk on heat. The poet compares the noisy and colourful birds to cheap prostitutes trying to attract clients. The lion and the tiger having been deprived of their habitat cannot do anything and are bored stiff. In the second stanza we have the metaphor of the boa-constrictor, which is coiled and motionless as if it were in this position for ages and has turned into a living fossil. In the second verse of the second stanza there is the repetition of the word “cage.”The poet uses repetition to emphasize on the monotonous appearance of the cage, which holds very little activity as all animals are confined and immobile. Stanzas one and two show that the entrapped animals cannot do much more than lazy about. In the wild they are active noble and dangerous but now they cannot express their instinct. I Instead they are obliged to lie about in a kind of stupor as if they were painted on a nursery wall.
The volta used in the third