Week 3- Still Life with Canary

Carey McHugh’s poem Still Life with Canary is constructed in a way that utilizes line breaks effectively to control the reader’s perspective of the images created by the author.  The second line of the poem places the ending of the first sentence “in bauxite.” Next to the beginning of the second “The fox holes in the field”, placing these two images next to each other forces the reader to envision foxholes cut into bauxite. This image immediately changes the readers view of bauxite if they were to simply view it from the first sentence “I will retell your version of loss in bauxite.”. Here the line break plays an empirical part in the author’s double purpose for the term “in bauxite.” This craft demonstrated by the line breaks occurs multiple times throughout the poem including the following line “are cut clean. Mountains to signify”, again the line break shifts the readers perspective from a clean cut fox hole to mountains cut cleanly into a landscape. McHugh then takes a different strategy and once again changes the perspective of the reader, taking them from the images of blackened miners to the image of a huntsman kneeling in a grove of mint. The image of the huntsman then seems to be obscure to the poem until the sign on the wall is revealed to the reader. It is then clear how the image of the huntsman is relatable to the miners. He must keep quiet so that he will not fail in his hunt just as the miners must keep quiet so that they may live. Both images represent peaceful beings in inevitably violent and morbid situations.