Summary Of Dead Armadillos By Gail White

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Recommended: Important allusions in literature

Gail White’s “Dead Armadillos” discusses the idea that no one truly cares about something until they are faced with the possibility of losing it. Armadillos are used to make this point because they die in multitudes every day and it does not seem to faze anyone and has become an excepted event in life. The poem then goes to explain how when too many armadillos have died, causing the world to only be left with a few of them, they will be considered important. Armadillos have become a common fixture to the roads of America along with many other animals that have been generalized as road kill. Often times, the armadillos are just looking for food when they happen across a busy highway and are met with an untimely death. The metaphor comparing the literal armadillos to “small blind knights/ in armor” ( 9-10) …show more content…

The simile comparing the beauty of the armadillos to money in the phrase “beauty, / like money, is worth more when it’s scarce” (14–15) makes the act of not caring when an armadillo dies seem more shallow. “When we’re down to the last half dozen, / we’ll see them with the eyes of God” (18-19) is a hyperbole because people will take notice before the number of armadillos reaches that extreme low and it makes the situation seem worse than it actually is. The assonance of “last half” (18) and the alliteration of “When we’re … we’ll see them with” (18-19) draw more attention to the hyperbole. The poem uses “eyes of God” (19) because of the connotation associated with it. In this case, the poem relies heavily on connotation because the speaker is not referring to literally looking through the eyes of the Christian deity. To most individuals seeing something from the perspective of God means that they see it as significant because God views all of his creations with adoration, whether it be something as big as a mountain or even smaller than an

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