Point of View

“Bringing the Shovel Down” is told from the perspective of a first-person speaker addressing a beloved in the second-person. From the beginning, the speaker’s intention is to share a story with the beloved and, by extension, with the reader. The use of the second-person pronoun “you” engages the reader’s participation in the story, which concerns a moral issue. The speaker confesses a story about a boy who, after hearing tall tales from a group of older kids, kills a neighborhood dog. By weaving elements from this embedded narrative into the poem’s present, the speaker suggests that anyone (the beloved or the reader) is capable of such an act. The role of the beloved and the reader is to witness what happened and to bring that awareness into their own lives.

The loving and intimate terms that the speaker uses for the beloved...