Teaching the Article
Exercise 3: Community and Charity
However prosaic the act of tossing a nut to a park squirrel might seem, feeding was at the heart of the new relationship that humans were establishing with urban squirrels. In addition to making it materially easier for squirrels to thrive in the city, feeding also symbolized the belief that charity could help to bind a community together—even, potentially, across the divide separating humans from animals. Marian Longfellow, a niece of the Romantic poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, expresses this idea in her poem, “The Pensioner in Gray,” which appeared in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas in 1908.
Questions
- What kinds of characteristics, virtues, and behaviors does the speaker of the poem attribute to the squirrel?
- How much does it matter that it is a squirrel, rather than another kind of animal, who is the subject of the poem? Could Longfellow have written a similar poem about a pigeon, a dog, a wolf, or a rat? About a human being? Why or why not?
- What makes an animal, or a person, deserving of charity?
Sources
- Marian Longfellow, “The Pensioner in Gray,” St. Nicholas, 36 (Nov. 1908), 11, available via Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=FhUbAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA11&ots=th4G0gTFzE&dq=%E2%80%A2%09Marian%20Longfellow%2C%20%E2%80%9CThe%20Pensioner%20in%20Gray%2C%E2%80%9D&pg=PA11#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%A2%09Marian%20Longfellow,%20%E2%80%9CThe%20Pensioner%20in%20Gray,%E2%80%9D&f=false
Local copy of article (JPG)