Admiration is this poem's disguise, and it keeps it on almost to the last line. The speaker is thrilled by a parade of "gormandising hens" carried along on the backs of "half-starved / Wranglers," and spends most of the poem guessing why the birds look so pretty. The answer arrives only at the end, and it is a grim one. Comfort, pedigree and appetite make a splendid show, but the show is also a kind of fattening. The creatures being applauded have no idea what the applause is for.
The opening image is already upside down. A wrangler is someone who handles horses and cattle, a person who works with animals. Here the wranglers are the pack animals, bowed under the weight of birds that do nothing but eat. The poem sharpens the contrast with its vocabulary: "gormandising" is a fat, rolling word, while "half-starved" is lean and hard. Even the line break joins in, since "Wranglers" sits alone on its own line, as if the word itself were being hoisted up.
The middle of the poem is a string of casual guesses: "Must be," "Or," "It could be." The speaker plays the amateur detective, offering one shallow cause after another for the hens' beauty. The first is "the famous farm name branded on / Their necks." A brand is a status symbol in the marketing sense, but it is also what is burned into livestock to show who owns them. The hens read it as glamour, and the poem lets us read it as a mark of ownership. The "unworried clucking that turns / Into song" works the same way. The key word is "unworried," because it quietly points out what the hens ought to be worried about.
The songs themselves are the funniest part. They celebrate "Doing nothing," and the poem delivers the punchline on a line of its own: "But doing it well, and often." The deadpan pause before it does the comic work. Then comes the parenthetical aside about schooling, "(not what they / Learned, but // Where they went to learn it)." The line breaks stumble here, as though the speaker were catching the joke mid-sentence. What counts is the name of the institution, not what was learned there. Judging by the imagery, the hens are a satire of idle privilege, where the label on the neck and the label on the school do the work that effort might otherwise do. The last topic of song is "what / They'll eat today // And eat tomorrow." That "tomorrow" sounds innocent, but it plants the idea of a future the hens are not looking at.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat. Its rhythm is that of a gossiping, chatty voice. Many lines end on weak, hanging words such as "of," "they," "but" and "Their," so each line leans into the next, like a speaker who cannot stop gushing. Every line begins with a capital letter, even in the middle of a sentence, which keeps the look of formal verse over a casual sound. That small mismatch echoes the hens' own borrowed grandeur. The poem also has almost no punctuation, and its only full stop falls at the very end. The sentence runs on and on, then closes like a trap.
That closing sentence is "I hope they look and sound as pretty / When they are roasting on a spit." It turns the poem's two compliments, how the hens look and how they sound, into a threat. The hope is cheerful and the cruelty is quiet. The speaker never says who will do the roasting, or whether the speaker is any kinder than the wranglers who carry the birds. The Italian title, "La Ghiottona," which means "the glutton" in its feminine form, may add to the effect. Judging by the tone, it turns the hens into a single type, labelled like a dish on a menu.
The poem is worth reading because it gets so much from so little. In under twenty short lines it builds a world of status, labour and appetite. It also shows how easily flattering language can be turned against its subject. The reader smiles along with the speaker and is then caught smiling at something nasty, which is the poem's sharpest trick.