Response to What They Ate

While reading Campbell McGrath's poem I found it to be extremely uninteresting and lacking. I failed to find a point to the poem and felt like it had wasted my time.

The problem that I had with this poem was that I never found a true meaning to the words. In the first paragraph the author discussed all times of animals; different types of fish, game, meats, and selfish to be precise. After reading through the stanza once again I still failed to recognize any reason as to why these types of animals were being mentioned and why specific animals of that classification were involved in the poem. There is no person involved in the story up to this point and the story did not really seem to have a point to it.

In the second and third stanza there is even more that is being mentioned of foods and it still seems to be for lack of a better term, meaningless. The only thing that has some sort of value for the story was when at the end of the second stanza when the author explains how the Dutch and Germans have different uses of cabbage. In addition, at the end of the third stanza where it mentions how the white sugar is worth a large sum of money and how bees from the Narragansett were imported. Even while these both have some amount of a story to tell within them, it didn't relate to the story or show a message that this poem was trying to tell.

This poem would be much better off if it was broken down into three separate poems where each one told a different story, yet still tied in with the others. I tried to imagine somebody who liked to hunt and fish after the first stanza, and once I had made that image in my head the second and third stanza contradicted as to what I was envisioning. This poem would benefit from breaking up the stanzas and including more information and a background story with each of them so that there is a point to all of these animals, vegetables, and seed-like foods that are being talked about. I would have been more interested if there were a main character that was being involved in all of this.

--Perry Wertheimer