How to Tell Wild Animals · Class 10 English · First Flight Poetry: 60 flashcards

Carolyn Wells.

Six stanzas of six lines each. The textbook asks students to read it aloud keeping a strong, regular rhythm.

That it is humorous and suggests some dangerous ways of identifying — telling — wild animals.

You are somewhere; a creature appears; you are given a distinguishing feature; and then you are told how to confirm it — by what the animal does to you.

A large tawny beast comes towards you in the jungles of the east, and it roars at you while you are dying.

By black stripes on a yellow ground — and the simple rule is to notice whether he eats you.

By a hide peppered with spots, confirmed as soon as he has landed on you — and roaring with pain will not help, because he will simply do it again.

You are walking round your own yard and something hugs you very, very hard. If you are still in any doubt, he will give you one more caress.

It does not name a single animal but separates two. A novice might be nonplussed, but hyenas come with merry smiles, and a creature that weeps is a crocodile.

Because although it is the only identification that does not require being attacked, by the time you can see a crocodile weeping it is close enough to reach you.

As small, a lizard sort of thing, with no ears at all and not a single wing.

If there is nothing on the tree, that is the chameleon.

Three things change at once: the creature is harmless, the identification is made by an absence rather than an attack, and the joke moves from violence to invisibility — a gentler and cleverer place to stop.

To make out or identify — exactly the word a serious field guide would use.

'Hide' is an animal's skin, and 'peppered' here means covered with spots.

A gentle, loving touch — used in the poem to describe a bear crushing somebody a second time. The gentlest word in the poem describes the worst event in it.

A novice is somebody new to a job; to be nonplussed is to be puzzled, confused or surprised.

Patient, helpful and slightly formal — the voice of somebody who has written a guidebook and wants you to get the identifications right. Nothing in it ever admits to being a joke.

The leopard's — he will leap again — and the bear's — he will hug again. As though the difficulty were observing carefully rather than surviving.

A real field guide, which is written in the shape 'if you see X and the creature does Y, then it is Z'. Wells keeps the form perfectly and replaces useful evidence with fatal evidence.

ababcc — four alternating lines and then a closing couplet, and the couplet carries the punchline every time.

Because four lines set up a scene — a place, a creature, a marking — and the couplet springs the trap. Since its two lines rhyme with each other, the joke and the sound land together, six times over.

Lines alternate long and short — roughly eight syllables, then six, then eight, then six — with the closing couplet in eights. Read at the strong regular pace the textbook asks for, it moves like a comic song.

Not strictly. But the poet has dropped the final g to help, and if you drawl the word and say 'lion' as a lazy two-syllable LY-un, the two can be made to chime. That is exactly what the set question is inviting you to try.

Because the reader can see the poet working. The dropped g is visible evidence on the page that the rhyme has been bullied into place.

No. The ordinary forms are 'leapt' and 'leap'. Wells respells them so that the sound matches 'Leopard', which is pronounced LEP-ard rather than LEE-oh-pard.

The invented word is used as though it were an ordinary verb — the leopard will only lep and lep again. The reader is asked to accept a new word and then watch it conjugated.

'A novice might be nonplussed.' The verb is normally used only in the passive — people are nonplussed by things; things do not nonplus.

Four reasons: it is shorter and fits the six-syllable line; it puts the rhyming word at the end where 'thus' can answer it; it keeps the sentence brisk; and a guidebook confident enough to bend English is funnier than one that is merely correct.

'Peppered' is chosen to answer 'Leopard', 'guess' is placed so that 'caress' can arrive, and 'thing' pairs with 'wing' — two of the vaguest words available.

Old-fashioned contractions of 'it will' and 'it is', found in old verse and older manuals. They keep up the pose of a serious authority while the advice is getting people killed.

For other examples of poets taking liberties with language, in English or in the student's own languages — and for humorous poems in those languages.

Because they only work when the reader can tell the writer knew better. A mistake is an accident; a liberty is a decision the reader is meant to notice.

The advice is confidently wrong, and so is the grammar. The identifications bend the facts while the rhymes bend the words — a poem about a guidebook that cannot be trusted, written in English that cannot be trusted either.

Give ababcc, and then add that the closing couplet carries the punchline in every stanza. The second half is what most answers leave out.

It comes into English from Greek and is said LEP-ard, not LEE-oh-pard — which is precisely why 'lept' and 'lep' work as rhymes for it.

Three of the seven — one each on pronunciation, spelling and grammar. A strong hint about where the comedy lives.

A brisk, confident, song-like beat carries news of being eaten and never falters once. The metre keeps the poem's straight face.

'Dyin'' with 'lion', and 'lept'/'lep' with 'Leopard'. Both require the reader to say a word the way the poet has written it rather than the way it is normally said.

Write out the corrected sentence — 'a novice might be nonplussed' — and only then explain why the poem's version is better. The question asks for both.

It glosses 'bearhug' for you, asks you to find out about the laughing hyena and crocodile tears, and then asks whether similar expressions exist in your own languages.

A friendly and strong hug — of the kind bears are supposed to give, as they attack you.

The phrase is entirely affectionate — people give each other bearhugs at airports — while the animal behind it is not affectionate at all. Warmth and danger sit inside a single word and nobody minds.

The spotted hyena makes a high, giggling call, and the name records what that sound resembles to a human ear rather than what the animal feels.

Stress or excitement. Researchers can even read an animal's age and rank from the call — so the friendliest-sounding noise on the plain means nothing friendly at all.

It means false grief — sorrow put on for show. It comes from an old belief that a crocodile weeps while it is eating its prey, an idea repeated as fact in early books of travel.

Because it is useful. Every language needs a name for grief that is not meant, and the crocodile has been carrying that job for centuries.

No. She is using two expressions her readers already knew, and the joke depends on their knowing them.

They take something dangerous and dress it in warm, sociable language — a hug, a laugh, tears. That is exactly what the poem's own euphemisms do with the leopard's caress and the bear's embrace.

Not a list but a noticing: that human beings everywhere borrow animals to talk about people — courage, cunning, greed, patience, cowardice — and that the animals rarely deserve what they are given.

Which lines you find funny, and — this is where the marks are — what serious ideas lie behind the humour.

That it parodies instruction; that knowledge in it always arrives too late to be useful; and that it doubts our confidence in classifying the world.

It keeps every feature of one — creatures taken in turn, distinguishing marks, a confident voice telling you what to look for — and removes only usefulness. Once that is gone, everything else looks absurd.

That every identification arrives during the attack. You know it is a lion when it is roaring at you and a leopard when it has landed — information that is perfectly accurate and completely worthless.

Because naming a danger is not the same as being safe from it. People often treat the two as though they were, and the poem quietly refuses to agree.

A mild scepticism about confident cataloguing. The poem belongs to an age of manuals promising to sort the world into tidy groups — and offers six stanzas of expert advice, not one of which would save anybody.

It gives the reader the only harmless creature in the poem and then admits it cannot be seen. The one animal you could survive is the one you cannot find.

Because a poem saying plainly that human knowledge arrives too late would be a gloomy thing. Wells says it six times in a cheerful metre with forced rhymes, and the reader laughs and takes the point anyway.

Give the meaning, then the origin, then the link — all three dress danger in friendly words, exactly as the poem does.

Lead with identification arriving too late, support it with the parody of a field guide, and finish on the chameleon — harmless and invisible.