Death Of A Toad Essay, Research Paper

People have many different ways of dealing with one of the most feared and respected portion of the human life cycle, death. Death is unavoidable, and we all meet our ends sooner or later. Many people react to the death of a loved one with remorse and sadness, some rejoice it as beginning of the afterlife, but no matter how we deal with death, we all come to accept it. In Richard Wilbur’s poem “The Death of a Toad,” the speaker expresses his acceptance and respect towards death as he witnesses a toad getting clipped in a power mower, then “hobbling” to a garden, the location of its final resting place. By integrating some effective images in to the poem, as well as a excellent use of syntax and diction, the author expresses his acceptance towards death through death of the toad in the poem.

The speaker begins to express his acceptance towards death in the first paragraph in the poem. The author utilizes some effective images and diction to depict the death of toad, and to reveal the acceptance and respect the author has towards death. The death of the toad is brought about as it is caught in a power mower, “chewed and clipped of a leg.” The toad then proceeds “with a hobbling hop…to the garden verge,” to where it dies. We begin to see the authors acceptace of the frogs death by the diction choice used by the author. As the frog dies in the garden, the speaker depicteds its death as being “sanctuarized.” We can see the frog not only leaving its life in the real world, but its death is shown as a more respectable and accepted death as it leaves the world “in the shade of ashen heartshaped leaves, in a dim, low, and a final glade.” The author’s choice to create an image of “Heartshaped leaves” also helps to give a degree of beauty to the death of this frog as we are given this view of a frog dying under a silvery planted shaped like a heart. As we can see in the first paragraph, the author integrates a nice variety of images and diction choices to express the author’s view of acceptance and respect toward ominescense of death.