Frogs Eat Butterflies, Snakes Eat Frogs, Hogs Eat Snakes, Men Eat Hogs Comments

No one seems to want to tackle this one. I really like this poem. The title is pretty much the food chain and the poem is about how untutored man and life itself is consumed and essentially without meaning. The tone is beyond dark. Rivers, usually a rather romantic or baptismal image, here are like nosing, grunting swine tugging at banks and sounding like churning stomachs. I can almost smell the rank, farm air like a swines breath that nevertheless is 'turgid, full of the essence of life, summer's heat and thunder. But the man who lived here saw nothing. He might have had another image than that of Stevens but he actually saw nothing - not even how the very farm sucked the life from him. His life was lazy, arid, and somnolent in that he never noticed its grotesqueness. The swine like river flows on to the sea where it too is consumed by the sea mouth. This is not a cheerful poem. Stevens likes to attach whimsical titles to very somber ideas