2012 Anthology entry: ‘The Butcher’s Shop’ by Angela Topping.
The text ‘The Butcher’s Shop’ is a English text written about an everyday English butcher shop, where people can buy freshly prepared often freshly slaughtered meat at a fair price under the butcher’s trading range. The purpose of the text is to describe how an everyday butcher shop looks like, what happens in the shop and possibly to make people feel sorry for the animals that have been slaughtered in the shop’s back slaughterhouse. This is done through the descriptive words used in the text, one example being: ‘a snowy sheep prance on tiles, grazing on eternity, cute illustrations in a children’s book. What does the sheep say now?’ This sentence will make the reader imagine a young lamb calf prancing in a field, and then realise that the animal has been slaughtered and cut up in the shop, for the benefit of the customer.
The text has been taken from the AQA 2012 anthology, but may have been originally printed in the author’s published book of poems.
The genre that this extract belongs to is poetry, in that it uses small yet detailed sentences which can be read with a rhythm out loud or in a person’s mind. The author is a former A level teacher, who now writes for audiences ranging from children to adults. Her latest book is a series of works such as poems for children.
The intended audience of this exact poem could possibly be young adults to adults, because the poem itself is too graphic for a young child to read, and if a child was to read this poem they may be mentally scarred by the images that are created in their heads from the descriptive words written in the text. One example of a sentence that has descriptive words which can harm a child includes: ‘All the way home your cold soggy paper parcel bleeds’. This sentence will make a child realise that a piece of animal’s flesh is inside the paper parcel, and they will figure this out from reading the rest of the text, and the key hint to the reader that this extract in fact is a poem about a butcher shop is this sentence: ‘The pigs are strung in rows, open mouthed dignified in martyr’s death’ which means the pigs are dead and hanging from a chain from the ceiling, their mouths open in a silent scream.
This text relates to the topic of food because it talks about freshly prepared meat from a traditional butcher shop, and meat in many households and cultures is a key factor in the diet of many people. Meat from many animals such as Chicken, Cows and Pigs have been a staple part of the human races diet for millions of years.
Another theme/topic that is addressed in this text ‘The Butcher’s Shop’ how humans can be considered as animals, simply because they consume the slaughtered bodies of another animal. This theme is presented in the sentence: ‘Tacky sawdust clogs your shoes’, and this sentence describes how the butcher shop floor is like a farm, where the animals that are alive walk on sawdust, and the humans are walking on it as if they are the very animals they are consuming and murdering.
One similarity this text has with another text in the AQA Anthology is the description of meat, and how ‘vile’ it can be considered to be. Another article which describes meat in a negative way, is the song ‘Meat is Murder’. The song was written by alternative rock band ‘The Smiths, and the song describes that consuming meat is ‘murder’ to innocent animals.
A difference that this text has to other texts in the anthology is that this article uses comparisons between positive and negative to make the reader realise the seriousness of eating animals. This is done by describing how a children’s books image is placed on a tile in the butcher shop, where animals are being slaughtered.
The text ‘The Butcher’s Shop’ is a English text written about an everyday English butcher shop, where people can buy freshly prepared often freshly slaughtered meat at a fair price under the butcher’s trading range. The purpose of the text is to describe how an everyday butcher shop looks like, what happens in the shop and possibly to make people feel sorry for the animals that have been slaughtered in the shop’s back slaughterhouse. This is done through the descriptive words used in the text, one example being: ‘a snowy sheep prance on tiles, grazing on eternity, cute illustrations in a children’s book. What does the sheep say now?’ This sentence will make the reader imagine a young lamb calf prancing in a field, and then realise that the animal has been slaughtered and cut up in the shop, for the benefit of the customer.
The text has been taken from the AQA 2012 anthology, but may have been originally printed in the author’s published book of poems.
The genre that this extract belongs to is poetry, in that it uses small yet detailed sentences which can be read with a rhythm out loud or in a person’s mind. The author is a former A level teacher, who now writes for audiences ranging from children to adults. Her latest book is a series of works such as poems for children.
The intended audience of this exact poem could possibly be young adults to adults, because the poem itself is too graphic for a young child to read, and if a child was to read this poem they may be mentally scarred by the images that are created in their heads from the descriptive words written in the text. One example of a sentence that has descriptive words which can harm a child includes: ‘All the way home your cold soggy paper parcel bleeds’. This sentence will make a child realise that a piece of animal’s flesh is inside the paper parcel, and they will figure this out from reading the rest of the text, and the key hint to the reader that this extract in fact is a poem about a butcher shop is this sentence: ‘The pigs are strung in rows, open mouthed dignified in martyr’s death’ which means the pigs are dead and hanging from a chain from the ceiling, their mouths open in a silent scream.
This text relates to the topic of food because it talks about freshly prepared meat from a traditional butcher shop, and meat in many households and cultures is a key factor in the diet of many people. Meat from many animals such as Chicken, Cows and Pigs have been a staple part of the human races diet for millions of years.
Another theme/topic that is addressed in this text ‘The Butcher’s Shop’ how humans can be considered as animals, simply because they consume the slaughtered bodies of another animal. This theme is presented in the sentence: ‘Tacky sawdust clogs your shoes’, and this sentence describes how the butcher shop floor is like a farm, where the animals that are alive walk on sawdust, and the humans are walking on it as if they are the very animals they are consuming and murdering.
One similarity this text has with another text in the AQA Anthology is the description of meat, and how ‘vile’ it can be considered to be. Another article which describes meat in a negative way, is the song ‘Meat is Murder’. The song was written by alternative rock band ‘The Smiths, and the song describes that consuming meat is ‘murder’ to innocent animals.
A difference that this text has to other texts in the anthology is that this article uses comparisons between positive and negative to make the reader realise the seriousness of eating animals. This is done by describing how a children’s books image is placed on a tile in the butcher shop, where animals are being slaughtered.