The poem’s subject is in the point of view of an animal, no specific animal to give the reader the creativity of their own imagination. The speaker is in the first person point of view of an animal on the farm. The theme of the poem is the cruelty of animals and what they go through on a farm, this includes the thought of children and how they see the animals which is shown in line 5 when it is said that the children are their wages. This shows that in order to survive, they have to be perfect and cute enough for the children to like them. It is also shown in the poem that some animals go insane due to the fact they can’t upstage, knowing that they are going to go under the blade (lines 1-4), turned into other things to produce (line 16), or their head turned into some reward like how hunters display deer heads on their wall, which is revealed at the end that the narrator was turned into a display and used as produce (lines 13 and 16). There are also uses of metaphors to compare how one thing is to another. For example, it is compared that the stage is their cage as well as the children being their wage (line 5). This helps give the readers a comprehension of the situation the animals are in, while also giving off a disheartening or sad/tragic mood so the reader can feel sympathy for the animals and the cruelty they go through to try to survive.