The Jaguar

The Jaguar

The poem ‘The Jaguar’ written by Ted Hughes describes the lifestyles of animals at a zoo and their different attitudes to living in a cage. It compares the bored, lazy moods of the animals to the lively, adventurous mood of the jaguar, which does not see this confinement as a way of stopping him behaving as if it were in its natural environment. The poet’s clever use of techniques such as similes and metaphors clearly puts an image in our minds of the animal’s ways of life and gives an accurate interpretation of what we would normally see at a day at the zoo.                                                                                                                                                 The animals are so lazy and bored that they are ‘fatigued with indolence,’ in other words, their boredom exhausts them. They spend most of their time sleeping, making it very uninteresting for the visitors to watch. It then talks about the parrots, which ‘strut like cheap tarts’ to try and get some food from passers by. The crowd aren’t interested in the parrots because they have lost their natural instinct of life. “The parrots shriek as if they were on fire,” this use of simile is effective because the parrots look like their on fire because of all the different colours it has. “The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun “, this suggests that the apes are so bored that they have time to adore their fleas and have to much time to sit and lay about in the sun.