Wow, I love the feedback we're getting already about this poem. So right now we all agree that this calf probably died of natural causes, and I really like that.
I do want to suggest we talk about the language which makes that a bit ambiguous though because I think if you just read the first stanza, it is ambiguous. It's not until you hit the second stanza that it becomes more of a concrete understanding that there's some gentleness going on here and that this poem is about love of life rather than death of the abnormal.
For me, this comes out with the phrase that you've all picked up on "Freak of nature" so let's look at that stanza more closely.
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
I feel like this is a case where the mother cow wouldn't come in and ended up having her baby in the field overnight. I know horses do that sometimes. I don't think the boy would have found the calf while it was alive. I get that from "Tomorrow when the boy finds" because you don't usually find something you already know about. I mean you can, but I don't find my phone every morning, I grab my phone. Plus I imagine if the cow was pregnant, and they knew it had just had the baby, they would have brought it in for the night? I don't know much about cows.
Anyway, from that, we go to this line break which I think is super important to highlight "Freak of nature" because it really does BOOST where that line shows up. Having "freak of nature" show up at the beginning of the line really makes it punch it's impact, and that's important because I feel like it ties closely into what he's wrapping it in, and where he brings it. I feel like this calf becomes valuable for the farm because it is a 'freak of nature' and we could be seeing the compensation value raise. I mean, a museum wouldn't buy a dead calf without it having two heads, so I feel like this dead calf loses it's life and BECOMES a money piece because of that. You wrap rocks in newspaper, old fossils, precious things that don't care if you get them dirty or not but need to be protected from the elements. You would wrap a baby or a living thing, something you cherished as a life in something else like a blanket. Newspaper is also the poor man's packing tool, or it used to be, so I feel like that's saying this family doesn't have much money to just bury this freak of nature, they need to make it into a freak of nature by putting it on expedition at the local museum.
That really makes the turn of this poem beautiful and I actually took the "twice as many stars" line to mean that the calf had twice as much wonderment in life before it was dead. If you're gazing at the stars, it's typically a symbol of a soul that likes to travel if you go by Trigun [an anime I love] but also if you go by old sailors, or popular myth. Stars also represent something unattainable, which is an interesting symbol because life was unattainable for this calf. It lived for a little while, and perhaps loved life twice as deeply until its death.
Just some thoughts. What do you guys think about my interpretation of the second question?
