Venus's-flytraps — Yusef Komunyakaa
Venus’s-flytraps — Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa’s Venus’s-flytraps is spoken entirely in the voice of a five-year-old boy. He wades through “deep” sunny grass toward tall yellow flowers, “unmindful of snakes” and stinging insects, half-playing and half-testing himself against a world of real danger — snakes, trains, and secrets he is not supposed to understand. The poem never leaves his head: everything is filtered through a child’s logic, so a flytrap can eat people, a train can crush a cow, and love and fear sit in the very same sentence.
The Poet and a Child’s Voice
Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947) is an American poet known for writing about childhood and memory in a voice that sounds naive on the surface but carries real knowledge underneath. In ‘Venus’s-flytraps’ he adopts a persona — the poem is written entirely from inside the boy’s head, so the reader has to work out what the adult world is doing to him from clues the boy himself barely understands.
The boy repeats “I am five” across the poem, anchoring his innocence. But in the same breath he claims his questions can “hurt” like “silver bullets” and wonders “what death tastes like” — the childlike voice keeps slipping into adult territory.
Themes: Innocence Beside Knowledge
The whole poem is built from juxtaposition: play beside danger, love beside violence, sweetness beside death. The boy imagines the flytrap flowers as “big as the First State Bank” and says they “eat all the people / except the ones I love” — a game of make-believe that also reveals how the boy sorts the world into people who are safe and people who are not.
His bravado is a child’s defence mechanism. “Don’t mess with me”, he warns, backed up by an imaginary “Lone Ranger” six-shooter — a toy-cowboy fantasy standing in for real protection he does not have near the train tracks, the snakes, and the strangers in the boxcars.
Komunyakaa writes in free verse, with short, often single-line stanzas and frequent enjambment — for example “I could start walking / & never stop”. The broken, tumbling lines imitate a child’s unfiltered thought process: short lines and frequent enjambment (“I could start walking / & never stop”) pull one idea straight into the next. At the same time the poem is built from very short, blunt sentences whose full stops often fall in the middle of a line (“Six-shooter. I can hurt”; “Babies come from. I am five.”), so statements land abruptly and images collide — bank-sized flowers, silver bullets, honey — exactly as they would in a five-year-old’s mind.
Key Language and Imagery
The train tracks bring the darkest imagery. The boy says he saw “what a train did to a cow”, and admits he is not supposed to be so close to the tracks at all. He watches men “hiding in boxcars” who “wave & holler for me to get back” — adults trying to protect him from a danger he treats as entertainment, laughing when the trains make the dogs howl.
The flytrap flowers are described as “sticky & sweet inside”, linking them to the bees that “can’t live without flowers” and to the boy’s question about why “Daddy calls Mama honey”. Sweetness, sex, and danger are folded into the same image — the flower is beautiful and predatory at once.
Even the boy’s play with butterflies carries a shadow of mortality: he tosses them “back into the air” but has already admitted he wonders “what death tastes like”. The gentle image and the unsettling question sit side by side without any comment from the poem — the reader has to notice the disturbance the boy does not name.
The Ending: Secrets Under the House
The poem closes on family shame rather than the flowers. The boy reports flatly that his “mama says I’m a mistake” and that he “made her a bad girl” — words clearly borrowed from an adult argument he has overheard, not understood. His final image is his “playhouse”, “underneath our house”, where he hears people “telling each other secrets”. The child’s hiding place, built for games, becomes the place where he absorbs the adult world’s hidden pain.
The poem is named after the flytraps, yet it ends on overheard family secrets. This shows the flowers are a way into the poem’s real subject: a child gathering fragments of an adult world he is too young to be given directly.
These comparisons are revision links, not exam tasks — the exam never asks you to compare two anthology poems directly. They help you choose and prepare a poem for the second part of the poetry question, and they sharpen the comparison skills the first part needs.
Out, Out— (Frost): both poems put a child close to a machine capable of killing — Frost’s buzz-saw and Komunyakaa’s train. Comparing how casually each poem describes the danger shows how both poets use understatement to make violence more shocking.
Cold Knap Lake (Clarke): both poems are built from a hazy, uncertain child’s-eye memory of near-death. Clarke asks “Was I there?”; Komunyakaa never questions his memory at all — comparing their confidence draws out how differently memory can be handled by a poet writing as a child.
My First Weeks (Olds): Olds recreates infancy as pure comfort — milk, warmth, safety. Komunyakaa’s five-year-old lives with snakes, trains and family shame. Comparing the two shows two opposite versions of how early life can be remembered.
Theme for English B (Hughes): both speakers navigate a world that marginalises them — Hughes’s narrator as the only Black student in his class, Komunyakaa’s boy kept back from the boxcars and excluded from adult secrets. Comparing how each speaker asserts a voice despite exclusion is a strong methods-based comparison.
Using This Poem in the Exam
If ‘Venus’s-flytraps’ is the poem printed for the comparison task, look for a link between the boy’s mixture of innocence and danger and whatever situation the unseen poem presents — a child facing something they do not fully understand is the strongest bridge. If you choose it for the second part instead, learn short, exact phrases such as “I am five”, “eat all the people”, and “telling each other secrets” — each one opens up the poem’s central idea without needing a long memorised passage.