Little Beast

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2019

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Richard Siken wrote “Little Beast” in free verse. There is no rhyme scheme and there is no identifiable meter. Some lines last for nearly 20 syllables while other lines stop at four or five syllables. The free-verse form works for a poem about chaos, violence, and legitimacy. Pre-established standards and rules don’t confine the men in the poem, and they don’t restrict Siken’s form for the poem. Siken is free to make his lines as jagged and uneven as he wants. The thorny lines add to the rough, frantic tone of the poem.

Conversely, Siken imposes order on the poem. He divides it into sections. The first and last sections feature two stanzas, and the sections in between feature one stanza apiece. The numbered sections contribute to the drama of the poem. The sections come across as separate acts or scenes. The first scene features the barbecue, the song, and the man with the buck knife; the second scene is of the peevish phone conversation; the third scene contains the riff on history and the little man; and so on and so forth. Siken has experimented with filmmaking, and the numbered sections infuse the poem with a cinematic quality.

Diction

Diction relates to the use of specific words by the poet to further the message and meaning of the poem. To draw out the chaos and the disorder, Siken uses a variety of choice words. He mainly deploys violent language to magnify the destructive desire in the poem. He talks about stabbings, corpses, car crashes, drowning, and death by suicide. The surfeit of brute terms keeps the poem focused on the harmful, self-destructive behavior of the men in the poem.

Occasionally, Siken switches the type of language used to add contrast. Siken doesn’t use forceful language exclusively. To counter the intensity, he throws in hackneyed or cliched language. The speaker calls his lover a sweetheart in Line 11. In Line 12, somebody says a trite idea about history. The banal diction creates tension with the boisterous words and keeps the poem somewhat unpredictable.

In Line 21, Siken zeroes in on his lover’s eyes, describing them as “green eyes flecked with yellow, dried leaves on the surface of a pool.” The sumptuous diction links Siken’s poems to a number of love poems where the lover’s eyes serve as a focal point. As William Shakespeare declared in his love poem, “Sonnet 130,” “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”

Imagery

The form and the diction relate to another literary device employed by Siken: imagery. Siken utilizes the long lines and the bellicose terms to produce a number of frenzied images. The destructive images occur throughout the poem and might make the reader feel as if they’re watching a violent movie or TV show. Stanza 1 features the image of bodies in a dumpster. Stanza 5 contains images that allude to disembowelment, car wrecks, and drowning. Stanza 7 conveys the image of a prototypical bad boy, replete with a gun, a car, and drugs. The threatening images align and advance the volcanic tone of “Little Beast.”

Personification

Personification takes place when an object—something without human agency—receives human traits. Personification can easily be confused with anthropomorphism, which is applying human traits/characteristics to objects and animals. If a poet talks about a weeping willow literally weeping, that poet is personifying the weeping willow. If a squirrel bakes the weeping willow a cake and, with a huge grin, tells the tree to cheer up, the smiling, baking squirrel is being anthropomorphized. Similarly, a bird pining for a tree branch or even talking about tree branches are examples of anthropomorphism. Inanimate objects are ripe for personification (think of a favorite song and there’s probably an example of personification: the sun smiling, the wind whistling, etc.) Siken, for instance, describes both the radio and the radio’s song in terms of personification. In Stanza 1, the speaker says that the “radio aches” and a little tune […] tells the story” (Line 2). The speaker then says that “the night / is thinking […] of love” (Lines 2-3). Siken gives human characteristics to the radio, the song, and the night through a popular literary device that allows the objects to further the story that Siken wants to tell.