This poem, "A Lesson in Hermeneutics" calls out for a good oldfashioned deconstruction. One could point out, for example, that the monkey who took the time to compose a warning about an approaching eagle or lion in iambic pentameter would also be eaten. Does Lake want to limit human communication to what monkeys are capable of? Consider the figures of speech that are off-limits to them:

allegory: they wouldn't understand Lake's own poem, which attempts to speak of human activities by speaking of non-human actors.

irony: suppose a monkey mistook a tree branch for a snake and raised a false alarm. Later on, the monkeys are talking: "Hey Fred, that was sure a frightening snake you warned us about this morning!"

hyperbole: "five thousand lions are coming!!"

litotis: "being carried off by an eagle is not entirely pleasant."

chiasmus: "working hard, or hardly working?"

Sure, I don't want my stoplight or my fire alarm to be ironical: "Well, sure it is red, but I'll go through anyway; it's a notoriously sarcastic traffic signal!"

But most of what we use poetry for rises above the level of simple fire alarms or APBs. If a monkey stopped to analyze the phonetic pattern of another monkey, "I think his accent is definitely from south of the swamp" and gets eaten up, does than mean we should we outlaw departments of linguistics too?

Evidently Lake wants us to pronounce the word "circling" as "cir-cuh-ling." Oops, I stopped to analyze the meter and was swept up by a hawk. Goodbye.