“Animal Crackers” begins with a dedication: “to Dimitri, when he is old enough to understand.” This poem, then, is an attempt to explain something difficult to a child. That’s just what seems to be happening in the poem’s world, too. In the first line, a child tells the speaker (with a tone of believable little-kid imperiousness): “Draw me a lion.”
The speaker, apparently trying to keep this child entertained, obliges with a picture of a “lazy, kindly beast” colored a cartoonish yellow. This lion doesn’t seem too ferocious. Indeed, the child’s next asks, “Does it bite?” Only when provoked, the speaker answers: “if you pull its tail / or say that it is just another cat.”
This lion, then—though it’s mostly “indolent” and “biddable,” lazy and obedient—has the potential to “bite” if someone either invades its personal space or insults its “ancient pride.” So far, this just sounds like a fable the speaker is telling the child in their care, a mild personification of a lion that draws on traditional ideas about the King of the Beasts. But over the course of this poem, the lion will come to symbolize something bigger and more frightening.
The speaker will recount their day drawing all-too-significant animals over 46 lines of free verse, without a regular rhyme scheme or meter. Every so often, though, the lines resolve into iambic pentameter (that is, lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “or say | that it | is just | anoth- | er cat”). These intermittent moments of metrical regularity help to drive the poem forward.
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