Analyze "The Barred Owl" for its meaning and form. Who is speaking? How is that sound and imagery reinforced? Determine its tone with examples.

The speaker in this poem seems to be the parent of "the wakened child" who has been alarmed at night by the "boom" of the owl's voice in her room. The speaker explains, in a patient, advisory tone, how he was able to send the child back to sleep by interpreting for her the sound the owl makes as an "odd question": "Who cooks for you?" The question is repeated deliberately in order to encourage the listener to transpose these words onto the sound an owl makes, more typically transcribed as "too-whit-to-whoo," or similar onomatopoeia, and repeated twice, as an owl might. A sound-picture is deftly created, in which the owl is nothing to be afraid of. We know, because the little girl can be encouraged back to sleep in this fashion, that this sound image served to turn the owl outside the window from something to be feared into a non-threat.
The first stanza of the poem is gentle in tone, as the speaker does, indeed, use words to "domesticate a fear," the use of distinct and familiar words turning the "boom" of the owl's unknown voice into something explicable. In the second stanza, however, the child safely put to bed, the reader feels a prickle of that terror the child experienced earlier. While words can indeed minimize fear, they can also serve "to make our terrors bravely clear." The child, asleep now, need not contemplate, as we must the image of "some small thing in a claw / Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw." Here, the poet vividly depicts, through the juxtaposition of this image with the harmless idea of the owl asking "Who cooks for you?", the difference words can make. For us, the owl becomes a "stealthy," unknown creature of the night once more, killing and eating in the dark, a "cook" for nobody but itself.