An essay comparing the theme of violence in the two poems from the Poems of the Decade anthology: Agbabi's 'Eat Me' and Feaver's 'The Gun', Written by a current university student that achieved an A* in English Literature A level by memorising these essays .
Compare the ways in which violence or the threat of violence is presented in ‘The Gun’ and one
other poem from the collection.
Two poems that explore issues relating to violence, or the threat violence, are Viki Feaver’s ‘The
Gun’ and Patience Agbabi’s ‘Eat Me,’ which both present relationships where one partner partakes
in activities with connotations of violence. The speaker’s husband kills animals throughout ‘The Gun,’
while a possible interpretation of the end of ‘Eat Me’ is that the speaker has killed her partner.
From the outset of ‘The Gun,’ there is an imminent threat of violence related to toxic masculinity.
Feaver opens the poem with the arresting statement “bringing a gun into a house changes it,” when
her presumably male partner brings home a gun. The rest of the poem could be seen as an
elucidation of this assertion, as the gun catalyses her partner’s killing spree of innocent creatures. It
awakens a primal side of the speaker’s partner that finds hunting thrilling, which is an activity linked
to the stereotypical male gender identity since prehistoric times. Feaver uses the first and second
person to convey the transformative effect the gun is having on him, as she follows with “You lay it
out on the kitchen table […] the grainy polished wood stock, “The long metal barrel Casting a grey
shadow on the green-checked cloth.” The gun could be perceived as a phallic symbol because it is
“long” and partially made of “wood”. Feaver also presents the gun as incongruous to the setting and
highlights the sinister quality to the gun through colour symbolism, as the gun’s “grey” shadow is
juxtaposed against the “green-checked” table cloth, as green is conventionally emblematic of life
and nature. In addition, the “checked” pattern emphasises the homeliness and comfort that the gun
is disturbing.
Meanwhile, in ‘Eat Me’ toxic masculinity ultimately leads to the violence, as Agbabi presents an
abusive relationship in which the male partner projects his unhealthy sexual fantasies onto the
speaker. The poem opens with the romantic gesture: “When I hit thirty, he brought me a cake, three
layers of icing, home-made,” but this positive tone is undercut by “a candle for each stone in
weight”. The inclusion of the candles representing the speaker’s weight may be a reflection of the
way some men judge and objectify women based on their outward appearance. Plus, the assonance
of “cake” and “weight” connect the speaker’s partner compelling her to eat with her increasing
obesity. Typically, emphasis is put on women’s weight being lighter, but instead the partner wants
the speaker to be overweight, which a taboo fetish and subsequently elicits more shock and
repulsion in readers. Agbabi could have done this to show how damaging any beauty standard
obsessing over women’s weight can be. She further presents the objectification of women through
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