Orrin Schwab's "The Rabbit" begins like a confession and ends like a joke that has stopped being funny. A man says he is a rabbit, "soft bellied and quick", and the poem agrees with him instead of arguing. "Self knowledge / being a sober forte / he was correct." The rest follows the comparison to its grim conclusion. Here is a clever, charming man who knows exactly what he is and uses that knowledge to stay hidden rather than to change.
The opening is carefully balanced. "He claimed" hangs at the end of its line, so we are unsure for a moment whether this is a boast or an admission. The speaker then steps in and confirms it. "Forte" means a strength, so the joke is that his strength is knowing his weakness. "Sober" works against the rest of the poem, with its buzzing, splintering and quick clips. Self-knowledge is the one calm, serious thing about him, and the poem will show how little good it does.
The middle stanzas catalogue his gifts and show them going to waste. His "eccentric charm" brings "more friends / than he could manage", a phrase that makes friendship sound like a workload. He has "a brilliant mind", but "a rabbit's resolve" means he cannot "harness it", and the verb is borrowed from carthorses and ploughs, a different animal altogether. Then come the people who "buzzed around him", as if he were a flower or a lamp, and the poem's bluntest line: young women want him as a friend "but not / lover since rabbits / are needed only for petting." The metaphor becomes cruel here. To be soft, safe and affectionate is to be wanted without being desired.
The form suits the subject. The poem has no rhyme, almost no punctuation and no capital letters, so it moves like the man himself, in "quick clips." Its few commas fall as small hesitations, as in "rabbits, unprotected" and "unwilling, naturally, to." The line breaks often land on an awkward word. "Friend but not" breaks before the rejection arrives, and "naturally, to" leaves us suspended before "risk." In "sapped / splintered it seemed", the sentence itself seems to splinter. The stanzas also shrink, from eight lines to five and finally four, and it is tempting to read that narrowing as a retreat into a burrow.
The ending carries the poem's central irony. "Try as he could / he failed to face / the hard world where / rabbits, unprotected / are eaten and skinned." "Eaten and skinned" is plain and physical, with no softening adjective. Then comes the last stanza: "this he could not consider." The man who is "correct" about himself cannot think about what that correctness implies. Self-knowledge has stopped at a boundary, and he lives on the safe side of it. The last word, "dinner", is homely and almost cheerful, and the sudden drop in register is darkly comic. "Naturally" does similar work. It excuses him as animal instinct, but the dry tone also hints that the excuse is a little too convenient.
The speaker's voice keeps all this from turning into mockery. It is level and observational, like a naturalist's notes, but "try as he could" shows some sympathy. The poem never says whether hiding is wise or cowardly, and it offers no rescue and no lesson about courage. It lets the paradox stand. Seeing yourself clearly can be a way of avoiding action, because a witty, accurate self-diagnosis can feel like progress when nothing has changed.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. Its central metaphor is simple and held steady from first line to last, and it never drifts into sentimentality. Most readers will recognise someone who deflects criticism by naming their own faults first, or will recognise the habit in themselves. The poem suggests that the habit is a hiding place and that the man inside it is safe, correct and, in the end, unreachable.