"Barn Owl" is one part of a diptych, called “Father and Child.” The latter poem in the diptych, “Nightfall,” sheds further light on the themes of “Barn Owl,” as the two poems are structurally and thematically similar. Like “Barn Owl,” “Nightfall” is divided into seven stanzas of six lines each, following an ABABCC rhyme structure. This structural similarity is further developed by the overarching, contrasting symbols of night and day. It is notable that the title of “Nightfall” itself contrasts with the first word of “Barn Owl”—“daybreak”—creating a sense of symmetry between the poems (line 1). More broadly, daylight is a recurring symbol in “Barn Owl” for the speaker’s journey toward maturity, while “Nightfall” explores the same issue from the opposite perspective: the coming of nightfall is a symbol for the speaker’s father’s impending death.
In “Nightfall,” the speaker’s father is eighty years old and is unwell. The speaker walks with him and spends time at his bedside, holding his “dry hand” as he comforts her due to her grief over his impending death (line 14). As with “Barn Owl,” mortality is a major theme of the poem, and the speaker again is in denial over the reality of death: “Let us walk for this hour / as if death had no power / or were no more than sleep” (lines 24-26). The use of the words “as if,” however, reveals that the speaker is no longer truly naïve about the power of death, as she was in “Barn Owl.” Instead, she is emotionally unwilling to accept her father’s death and craves a return to her childhood state when she was naïve about what death entailed.
Just as in “Barn Owl,” Harwood also complicates the traditional relationship between a parent and child. In “Barn Owl,” the speaker initially rejoiced in her sense that she was more powerful than her father because he was sleeping while she was awake, prowling toward the barn with a gun. In “Nightfall,” the father has become physically weakened, and the speaker again imagines that her father is innocent: “Your passionate face is grown / to ancient innocence” (lines 21-22). The oxymoron “ancient innocence” captures the complicated relationship between age and power that is explored in both poems—the father is simultaneously old, implying that he is wise and familiar with the world, and rendered “innocent” by his age and illness.
In addition to exploring similar themes, “Nightfall” gives us insight into the speaker’s character development since the events of “Barn Owl.” The speaker now identifies birds and flowers as she passes, showing her continued immersion in nature and her more positive attitude toward wildlife; instead of viewing a bird as a “prize” to be shot like in “Barn Owl,” the older speaker enjoys observing and identifying the wildlife with her father. In the final lines, the speaker contrasts herself with the child that she was in “Barn Owl”: she was “the child once quick / to mischief, grown to learn / what sorrows, in the end / no words, no tears can mend” (lines 39-42). These lines reinforce the central theme of “Barn Owl” about a child’s inevitable loss of innocence. While once engaging in “mischief” like shooting the owl with no knowledge of or care for consequences, the speaker is now an adult who is aware of the deep pains of life, such as the mortality of both an owl and her own father.
