A Tiger in the Zoo · Class 10 English · First Flight Poetry: 60 flashcards

Leslie Norris.

Five stanzas of four lines each.

That it starts at the zoo, goes out to the jungle, and comes back again — and it asks students to say which stanzas belong to each.

Stanzas one, four and five are the zoo; stanzas two and three are the jungle. So three stanzas of captivity hold two of freedom inside them.

He walks the short length of his cage and back, brightly striped, on soft silent paws, with an anger he never lets out.

That his beauty is intact — the stripes are vivid; that his movement is soft — velvet pads; and that something is very wrong — there is rage under it, and it is silent.

In steps — and the poem says there are only a few of them. A wild tiger ranges over many square kilometres; this one has a distance that can be counted.

Hiding in shadow and moving low through the tall grass towards the pool where well-fed deer come down to drink.

Because nothing in the jungle stanzas is actually happening. They describe what ought to be the case, so the jungle exists in this poem only as a kind of grammar — and the anger of the poem lives in that one word 'should'.

Snarling around the houses at the jungle's edge, baring his white fangs and his claws, and terrorising the village.

Because the free tiger is not made harmless or picturesque. He is frightening, and frightening to people — Norris refuses to sentimentalise what freedom would actually look like.

Making an angry, warning sound. It is the only word the textbook glosses for this poem.

'But' — at the start of the fourth stanza.

That he is locked in a concrete cell with all that strength penned behind bars, pacing his cage end to end and ignoring visitors.

Because everything in a zoo is arranged so that people can see the animal, and the tiger's only answer is to refuse to notice them. Indifference is the one power he has left.

He hears the last voice at night and the patrolling cars, and turns those brilliant eyes on the brilliant stars.

That a zoo at night is a guarded building — and the poem says so without a word of comment.

Because they are the only thing in it that the bars do not shut out, and the only thing left that is as bright as he is — and they are also completely out of reach.

It never uses the word 'cruel', never argues, never blames a keeper and never asks for the tiger's release. It describes a cage, imagines a jungle and returns to the cage.

Because a poem ending in the third stanza would be a fantasy of escape. Ending in the cage twice over makes the jungle a measure of what has been lost rather than a promise of what is coming.

To find the words describing the tiger's movements and actions in the cage and in the wild and arrange them in two columns; and to do the same for the words describing the two places — then to discuss what the poet's choice of words and pictures does to set the two situations against each other.

Stalks, stalking, locked, ignoring, hears and stares.

Lurking, sliding, snarling, baring and terrorising.

Every verb in the wild column acts on a world — shadow, grass, houses, a village — while not one verb in the cage column does anything to anything.

Because stalking is a hunter's walk, and in a cage it is a hunter's walk with nothing to hunt, performed along a few steps of concrete. The action survives; the purpose does not.

Because each needs its surroundings: lurking needs shadow, sliding needs long grass, snarling needs houses and terrorising needs a village. Freedom in this poem is having something to act on.

Cage, a few steps, concrete cell, bars, visitors and patrolling cars — all of them hard, man-made and countable.

Shadow, long grass, water hole, plump deer, houses at the jungle's edge and the village — all of them soft, living and uncounted.

A texture: pads of velvet quiet against a concrete cell. Nothing in the zoo could be called velvet and nothing in the jungle could be called concrete — and one word belongs to the tiger, the other to what has been built around him.

Because the world outside is not merely open but well fed — the deer are plump and they pass a water hole in numbers, while the poem never once mentions the tiger being fed in the zoo.

The jungle is described in quantities nobody counts — long grass, shadow, plump deer — while the cage is described in a count: a few steps, and a number of bars.

Vivid stripes and brilliant eyes keep his beauty intact; white fangs make the imagined threat concrete; long grass and plump deer supply abundance; and 'concrete' supplies the opposite of all of them.

The jungle is loud — snarling, terrorising — while the cage is silent: velvet quiet, quiet rage, ignoring. The tiger makes no sound at all in the zoo.

Human ones. He hears the last voice at night and the patrolling cars — so the only noises in his world are made by the people who put him there.

In the jungle stanzas he is the one who frightens; in the zoo stanzas he is the one who is watched. The poem marks the reversal in two words — terrorising, and visitors.

Because the tiger makes no sound at all in the zoo. Snarling, baring and terrorising belong entirely to the imagined jungle.

Explain what the lists show: that the cage verbs have no objects while the wild verbs all do; that the zoo words are hard and man-made while the jungle words are soft and living; that velvet stands against concrete; that the jungle is abundance and the cage measurement; and that the tiger is silent while the zoo's soun…

A car — the patrolling cars of the final stanza.

'Concrete'. It is the only adjective the cage gets, and it does the work of a paragraph — hard, grey, man-made and permanent.

By laying two sets of vocabulary side by side. Sort the words into columns and the argument appears, with no adjective of judgement and no comment from the poet at all.

Pads of velvet quiet followed by his quiet rage; and his brilliant eyes followed by the brilliant stars. It asks what the effect of the repetition is.

The word moves from the outside of the tiger to the inside in one line — first describing how softly his pads fall, then describing his rage. So the softness and the fury turn out to be the same thing.

Because he never roars or charges; he paces quietly and ignores people. The repetition tells us the calm is not calm — and that a visitor watching him would see only the first meaning of the word.

It ties the caged animal to the free sky. Captivity has taken nothing from his brightness — he is still as vivid as anything above him — and the stars are the one thing the bars cannot shut out.

The stars are the furthest thing a poem could have chosen. So the echo says he is as brilliant as they are, and as far from his own life as they are from him.

So that the echo arrives while the first use is still in the reader's head. The comparison is made by sound rather than by statement, and the reader completes it without being asked.

Because each second use changes the meaning of the first. 'Quiet' shifts from his pads to his temper, and 'brilliant' shifts from his eyes to the sky — neither is simply the same word said twice.

abcb in every stanza — only the second and fourth lines rhyme, and the first and third do not.

Cage with rage in the first stanza, grass with pass in the second, and cars with stars in the last.

The third — edge with village — and the fourth — bars with visitors. Both are near misses that keep the poem from ever sounding tidy.

Nothing regular. The lines are short and plain with no fixed beat, so the poem reads as observation rather than performance — somebody watching an animal and saying what is there.

Almost everything — vivid stripes, velvet pads, white fangs, his strength, brilliant eyes, and even the instinct to stalk.

One thing only: the world in which any of that could be used. He is perfect and has nowhere to be perfect in, which is the source of the quiet rage.

Because damage explains itself. This tiger is undamaged and useless at the same time, and it is that combination the poem finds unbearable.

It prints three further poems — about a tiger, a panther and the greater cats — and then asks whether zoos are necessary for conservation, whether they are useful for educating the public, and whether there are alternatives; then it asks students to take a point of view.

That some species now exist only because zoos bred them, and that many people first come to care about animals because they have seen one. An honest answer must meet that point rather than ignore it.

By distinguishing keeping from conserving. Norris's tiger is not being conserved or explained — he is being kept, in concrete, with a few steps to walk. The real question is what kind of keeping, which is why modern enclosures are planted and spacious.

Take the two pairs separately and say what changes between the first use and the second — 'quiet' from his pads to his rage, and 'brilliant' from his eyes to the stars.

The abcb rhyme with its full and half rhymes, the plainness and speech-likeness of the language, and the central point that nothing has been taken from the tiger except the use of himself.

The one about the greater cats, which ends with eyes staring out between bars at different skies and different stars.