Imagery In Snowy Egret

In Bruce Weigle's “Snowy Egret,” he uses violence imagery to show that when one feels determined to try to become a man, he may make poor decisions and be forced to deal with the consequences. In the beginning of the poem, the speaker finds his neighbor’s boy, bawling and holding a shotgun that belonged to his father. Without his father’s permission, the boy had “lifted his father’s shotgun.” (1) The boy steals the shotgun during the middle of the night. The “lifted” shotgun represents a physical force as a symbol of strength, something a young boy wants. Trying to find a shortcut through his childhood, he desires to quickly grow up to please his father. Later in the poem, the boy, now intensely sobbing as he tells his story to the narrator,