Question

Answer the following question in about 100-120 words:

Examine the difference between the tiger in “A Tiger in the Zoo” and the dragon in “The Tale of Custard the Dragon”.

Answer 1

The tiger in Leslie Norris’s “A Tiger in the Zoo” is a powerful, restless creature trapped and frustrated, pacing a “few steps of his cage,” full of “quiet rage,” remembering the wild he’s denied; the poem treats confinement as tragic and constraining.

By contrast Ogden Nash’s Custard is a comic, self‑professed coward: physically fearsome in description yet timid, craving a “nice safe cage” and mocked by friends, until a crisis reveals surprising courage. The tone is playful and ironic rather than elegiac, so Custard’s weakness becomes part of a humorous reversal when he defends Belinda.