Trapped Dingo
Trapped Dingo - meaning Summary
A Lament for Silenced Voice
The poem confronts the violent killing of a dingo and hears its death as the silencing of a wild, poetic voice. The speaker answers the animal's mournful cry and connects it to epic losses—Achilles and Hector—and Andromache's bereavement, turning a specific act of cruelty into an elegy. It frames the animal's death as both personal and cultural loss, suggesting that brutality against nature extinguishes song and creative memory.
Read Complete AnalysesSo here, twisted in steel, and spoiled with red your sunlight hide, smelling of death and fear, they crushed out your throat the terrible song you sang in the dark ranges. With what crying you mourned him! - the drinker of blood, the swift death-bringer who ran with you so many a night; and the night was long. I heard you, desperate poet, Did you hear my silent voice take up the cry? - replying: Achilles is overcome, and Hector dead, and clay stops many a warrior's mouth, wild singer. Voice from the hills and the river drunken with rain, for your lament the long night was too brief. Hurling your woes at the moon, that old cleaned bone, till the white shorn mobs of stars on the hill of the sky huddled and trembled, you tolled him, the rebel one. Insane Andromache, pacing your towers alone, death ends the verse you chanted; here you lie. The lover, the maker of elegies is slain, and veiled with blood her body's stealthy sun.
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