Precis: "The Blue Bowl"

In “The Blue Bowl”, Jane Kenyon generates a downcast tone, describing the death of a childhood cat through the use of similes, structure, and alliteration to depict how painful death can be. She starts off and ends off using similes. First, she compares burying the cat to primitives, and later she compares the reminder of a robin to an annoying neighbor who can never say the right words. Their cat obviously died while trying to eat a bird, and the robin chirping at the end of the poem is sad reminder to the cause of the death of their beloved pet. Kenyon also manages to shed light on the pain felt by the children through the usage of alliteration. The words “buried”, “bowl”, and “barehanded” show how the children felt empty as they laid the cat to rest. Additionally, the structure and breakup of the stanzas has no set form because death isn’t predictable. It doesn’t follow a pattern; it's erratic and pops up out of nowhere. The key similes, alliteration, and structure set throughout the poem reveal how surprising and hard death can be.