The Death of a Toad (1950). Content and Description

The speaker notices a toad that has lost its leg after being run over by a power mower; it hobbles to the edge of the garden, takes refuge under some leaves, and looks out upon the lawn as its life and blood drain from its body. The speaker imagines the toad’s transition to a mystical realm of death, but the poem ends by returning to a focus on the toad’s open but unseeing eyes as the daylight moves across the lawn.

Here, as in “The Beautiful Changes,” Wilbur uses three six-line stanzas featuring a regular rhyme scheme (in this case, aabcbc) and a roughly similar appearance on the page, but he also introduces an element of freedom into his line lengths: The first line of stanza 1 (for instance) consists of eight syllables, while the first line of stanza 2 consists of nine, and the first line of stanza 3 consists of 10. Along with these unpredictable line lengths is a looseness of meter:

Although the first line is solidly iambic (in other words, revealing a pattern in which an unaccented syllable is followed by an accented syllable), the rest of the poem shows a great deal of variation, and in fact, Wilbur makes very effective use of heavy accents on key words (often verbs) at the beginnings of lines, as in lines 2, 6, and 8. Enjambment (running lines together without punctuation) is skillfully employed to give the poem momentum, while assonance, alliteration, and an abrupt rhythm are all wittily used in the phrase “hobbling hop.” The toad’s death, meanwhile, obviously serves to symbolize the mortality common to all living things, including the humans who have (paradoxically) invented a destructive machine in order to cultivate natural beauty.

Wilbur makes us pause and care about a death that might otherwise be unnoticed or unmourned, balancing a real sense of loss with poetic playfulness in his choice of words (as in the assonance of “monotone” [l. 12], in which the sound of the word itself mimics the concept the word describes, or in the extravagant and partly whimsical reference to “lost Amphibia’s emperies” [l. 14]). If the poem has a flaw, it may be that the tone of the opening lines of stanza 3 is too playful, too clever, but by the end of the work Wilbur has again found his proper balance, and the poem ends on a note of seriousness that seems appropriate to the death even of so small and seemingly insignificant a creature.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Compare and contrast the significance of mowing in this poem and in Robert Frost’s “Mowing.” In which poem is man more in harmony with nature? Why would the tone and imagery of lines 13-14 of Wilbur’s poem seem inappropriate in Frost’s work? How is the overall tone of Wilbur’s poem more pessimistic?

2. Compare and contrast this poem with Marianne Moore’s “To a Snail.” How do both poems manage to take something seemingly insignificant and find deeper meaning in it? Which poem seems more abstract, and why? Which poem seems more inherently interesting, and why?

3. Compare and contrast this work with Philip Levine’s poem “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives.” Discuss the tone, diction, imagery, and implications of the two works. What do they imply about the relations between animals and humans? Which is the more “romantic” of the two works, and why?