A dark, witty pun in the fifth stanza warns that the distance between childhood innocence and adult cruelty might not be so very great.
All through this poem, the child the speaker is taking care of has one repeated request for them: to “draw” something. First, the child asks for a drawing of a lion, then a drawing of a tiger. The speaker fulfills these requests, but their mind is elsewhere: the lion and the tiger are the traditional symbols of the Sinhalese and Tamil ethnic groups, respectively, and at the very moment that the speaker draws these creatures, the groups they represent are murdering each other outside.
The speaker might be particularly startled, then, when the child barks “DRAW,” but with a different meaning: now they’ve pulled out a toy gun, and like a gunslinger in a Western, they playfully tell their caretaker to pull their own toy weapon. This imaginary violence hits a little too close to home for the speaker, who pleads with the child to “Put down that gun.”
By making a sudden, alarming leap between drawing a picture and drawing a weapon, this pun suggests that the speaker is more than a little uncomfortable with the thought that the innocent child they’re trying to protect might easily grow up to be one of the murderers and looters rampaging past outside.
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