An immigrant who came to America after a poet of the night; in each of his books, he returns to those most deserted hours when the majority of the population is fast asleep.As a child, Simic lived through the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia.

However, the poem implies that the voice sustainsthe speaker. POEM SUMMARY

Another, more personal (for the poet) connotation has its origins in war-torn Belgrade in the 1940s; here, the young Simic—by his own admission, in an interview reprinted in The knives in stanza 3 constitute the third image/object of destruction in Simic’s “little shop of horrors.” These knives, ostensibly used to slice meat into marketable cuts, seem to offer a kind of salvation, for they “glitter like altars / In a dark church / Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile / To be healed.” This is a highly complex image that carries both positive and negative associations with it. Perhaps the reason that terms and characters associated with darkness—including devils, insomniacs, hotels, and nightmares—recur in Simic’s poetry is because of his early experiences in war-torn Europe.
As usual, Simic delivers his account elegantly: “There’s a wooden block where bones are broken, / Scraped clean—a river dried to its bed.” In line 13, Simic makes ample use of alliteration—“block,” “bones,” “broken”—which slows the reader down. Finally, the term “feminine ending” refers to the extra unstressed syllable in “broken.” Despite occasional metrical lines in the poem, the fact that all the lines do not conform to one basic pattern classifies the poem as “Butcher Shop” is written in quatrains, or four-line stanzas. ALLEN GINSBERG Throughout his career, but especially in his earlier years, Simic has demonstrated an obsession with food and the implements we use to prepare and serve it.

So the importance of human life and the improvement of it is also hinted at right from the start.

The phrase comes from rhyming slang in which "butcher's hook" rhymes with "look." The blood-smeared apron achieves an allegorical resonance; it represents the brutality that humankind relentlessly performs in time after time of madness. One can surmise that Simic finds the whole enterprise vaguely cannibalistic—that in eating the flesh of animals, we are just one step removed from eating each other. “Charles Simic: An Appreciation,” in This book is a highly lucid account of modern poetry.

2002 By comparing that light to “the light in which the convict digs his tunnel,” Simic strips the word “light” of all of its positive connotations and encapsulates the human condition in the form of a convict trying to escape his fate through a poorly lit, claustrophobic tunnel.


CRITICISM On the positive side, an altar is a place for communion with God where people can be “healed,” and though the church is a dark one, it still is symbolic of civilized man’s connection with the positive force of God.

Therefore, this particular light offers only a glimpse of hope.Contrary to the specific, domestic images in the butcher shop—the night light, the apron, the knives—the representations of light and blood are abstract and convey an expanding sense of meaning associated with suffering.

So, as you can see, wooden slabs have long been a canvas on which depictions of man’s inhumanity to man have been painted in deep red.For Simic, though, the wooden block is an archetype with even deeper associations. Such deliberate hesitation (as if gearing up for the finale) puts considerable pressure on the last two lines.

For the poet, the various items in the shop represent something far beyond their domestic purposes: a dim light symbolizes the light of a convict digging a tunnel; blood on an apron becomesa map with “contents” and “rivers of blood”; the glittering knives change into altars in a church where the wretched come to be healed; and the wooden block where the butchering takes place stands for a form of death in which the poet is implicated. And best of all it's ad free, so sign up now and start using at home or in the classroom.

It is odd, of course, that these instruments of death remind the night-owl speaker of healing and salvation, though religious teachings sometimes connect death and salvation. GENRE: Poetry

Simic pares his language to a bare minimum, though in its essence, he shows an abiding concern with language and the expression of thought.

Topics For Further Study What’s more, the shop is closed.But where is the speaker, anyway? In this poem, of course, there is the obvious association with the meat hook, by which huge slabs of animal carcasses are hung in slaughterhouses. Or is “healed” just a euphemism for “murdered”? The knives in the butcher shop are compared to “altars / In a dark church / Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile / To be healed.” In these lines, the poem adds to its list of mysterious figures, with a reference to “they” who “bring the cripple and the imbecile.” “They” is a pronoun without a referent: are “they” the parents of the invalids, the clergy, or townspeople?

A butcher shop, of course, sells animal meat, a food that helps sustain human life.

On this table, “bones are broken,” and the butcher skillfully removes the meat from the animal carcasses so that the bones are “scraped clean.” The poet continues line 14 with the image of “a river dried to its bed.” A dash connects the two parts of the line, suggesting that the bones are scraped clean and dried by time. A key word in this stanza is “hook”; it is a word that appears in Simic’s early poems quite a bit and one that carries its own chilling connotations. While “Butcher Shop” is an allegory about the darkness of the human condition, it also offers an allegory about poetic inspiration.

The last stanza must explain the purposeful march to this particular butcher shop; it must elucidate why this shop conjures up continents, rivers, oceans, altars, and churches.The fourth stanza begins with more of the same—a painstaking description of the gory furnishings of this shop of death.

“Butcher Shop” ends unexpectedly, with the speaker “fed” and “hear[ing] a voice.” This moment is exceptional: only during it does the speaker communicate with anyone or anything else.