If anyone can make sense of this : 1000 karma

[samoth]

He's referring to William Blake's........The Lamb...no clue what it's about...dude sounds like he is remembering youth and innocence lost.

For anyone who might want to check:

http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~wblake/eE.html

Complete Blake archive.

 

[Yarg!]

For anyone who might want to check:

http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~wblake/eE.html

Complete Blake archive.

I had to write a mini essay on the poem, here is my take: (rough draft)

The Petting Zoo by Barry McKinnon is a metaphorical comparison between poetry, and a day spent at a petting zoon. Within the first stanza, the reader is introduced to a poet’s thought process as he attempts to find a specific poem within a sea of other poems, which are presented as different caged animals. The second stanza elaborates this comparison by introducing Blake (as in William), and more instances of animal-poetry comparisons. The third and fourth stanzas describe the poems as hungry, caged animals (the cages being our thought process) and the only attraction they feel for the poet is based solely on symbiotic terms, driven by their longing for sustenance- which in this case is creative input.

The poem’s opening line, “at the petting zoo, I (break) wonder where the poem is”, is an interesting showcase of McKinnon’s first comparison of poetry and a petting zoo. Here the narrator arrives at a petting zoo (which may or may not be simply in his head), and instead of wondering where a common animal might be found, he wonders where the poem is, meaning the poem is a member of the zoo’s populace.

That being said, perhaps the following stanza, “It’s Blake’s lamb” refers to William Blake’s poem, the Lamb, and is yet another allegorical comparison by McKinnon between poetry and the zoo. Instead of simply stating a lamb, it had to be Blake’s Lamb, meaning all the animals of the zoo are animals drawn from other poetic works, are poetic works in and of themselves.

The third stanza’s “what makes the animals our friends” comment is another clue of McKinnon’s metaphor. Here, he states that poems (as animals in a petting zoo) are merely our friends because of their hunger- which in a poem’s sense is creative input. Creative input meaning, the ideas and philosophies that the poet ‘feeds’ his or her poem, much like an animal, in their effort to nurture its growth.

However, like in a petting zoo, the poet can only do so much since sooner or later he will have to publish the poems, or release them to the world. This in a sense can be much like a cage-a barrier between a poet and their poem that separates the two factors from really bonding. The poet can only input so many ideas before he has to let the poem go; as a writer, a poet is aware that not every thought or idea are going into the final publication. As such, much like animals in a petting zoo, the poems are separated from the poet at the end of the day because of the ever present cage that is editing, and at the end of the day, much like a visit to a petting zoo, the poet will have to return home and leave their poems behind.

 

[Longhorn85]

I hope you haven't turned that in yet. Basically you are saying it's a poem about writing a poem.

I think you need to go deeper than that to see what the author meant.

 

[Alyosha K.]

The great thing about poetry is that there is no singular, common response - there is no right or wrong. While an author should strive to relate a "message" to the readers, he must understand that interpretation of that message is ultimately decided by the reader. A great poem is less about the actual message within it, and more about the feeling/response a reader gets from internalizing the verse.

And by the way, you're all wrong anyways. It's clearly a poem about the dynasty of the New England Patriots, derrr....