Diction In George Bogin's Poem 'Cottontail'

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Have you ever been haunted by something since a kid? In case your afraid to say so, it happens to people all the time. It requires having a severe or not so severe personal experience that traumatized you for a long time. Which you think about almost every day that you can't stop or dispel. In George Bogin’s poem “Cottontail,” George uses Diction, Imagery, Irony, and Symbolism to suggest that he regrets as child a shooting of a rabbit and to today haunts him, hinting that he might have had a personal experience with death. Bogin uses Diction in his poem to describe and tell the reader about how the old man felt through his fear and scary experience. He applies the words “cornered” and “terrified”, to tell and call attention of how the cottontail rabbit is terrified by the two boys cornering it. The man who is haunted to this day connects to the rabbit at that moment by being haunted and terrified. Which has a sad impact on the feeling of the reader and the theme of the poem. Then George uses word choices such as “spare”, “killed”, “tears”, and “shot” to build the thoughts of the readers attention towards the tone shifting from happy to slowly shifting to sadness which makes this poem …show more content…

The rabbit was scared: “We cornered a terrified little cottontail rabbit, trembling, while we were deciding whether to shoot him or spare him, then my friend fired and killed him and burst into tears. I did too.” This slides towards the main idea of the rabbit being scared and same as the boy. So they both felt sad, the two boys and the rabbit. “A little cottontail. A haunter.” symbolized the boys fear and regret to this day. To this day the man, still haunted towards what he did about fifty years ago. Where were the parents? That is an clue for symbolism. But the overall idea is to make a symbol of how the boys related to the rabbit at the

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