The poem The Cow by Andrew Hudgins is mainly about the process of raising a cow and the work a farmer and a butcher does. It is interesting that while I was reading the poem I felt this fast pace going. As if it is showing a process that is slow but, when reading it feels that for them the process of raising a cow went like just yesterday they got the cow and now its being killed. As reading it I realized some parts as such as “pull out her insides to throw to the dogs” and where it says “We drain them and gut them” sounds sadistic. It is true though it may sound sadistic but this truly is the process of the cow being butchered. As soon as the cow doesn’t have enough strength to give milk, or butter it will be slited by the throat.
It seems that there is a lot of emotional things going on. When you read this poem it starts off in a calm way and shows perhaps the farmers love for his cow. Then everything from their goes off to killing it and dismembering the cow, sending it to the market, grilling the steak. Through out the whole poem the cow was never really disrespected sure it might’ve been killed. But, in the end its thanked for offering food, milk and butter.
Huseyin Akis
I agree that this poem has a lot going on emotionally. It begins so calmly with the speaker saying the he/she loves the red cow. The poem proceeds with a violent twist in which the cow’s slaughter is brutally described.
I found a lot of irony in this poem. The first piece of irony that I noticed in the poem is where the speaker speaks of how much he/she loves the cow but seems to look forward to the day when the cow is too old to produce milk and hence is brutally stabbed to death and her insides thrown to the dogs.
I found it ironic also that after being slaughtered, the cow is cooked and served with butter that was made from its own milk.