RED FOX--a little different from the one read in class.

In Margaret Atwood's Red Fox, she uses her diction and imagery to put forth the idea of social classes and their views on this subject. In the poem, we can see that the speaker is the upper class or those who have things such as property (i.e. homes, cars, food..). We know this because of the words "none of my business" "zero charity" and the fact that the person is standing in the "bushy cemetery". These words help understand the the speaker is someone who is not apart of the lower class because the lower class is later described as the fox.
The fox is described as a "lean vixen" where the speaker can see "the ribs" and the fox's eye's that are "filled with longing and desperation," these descriptions can imply and describe the poor or the lower class because they depict an image of starvation. Being able to see the ribs and the words longing and desperation and the repetition of the food hunger lead the reader to believe that the fox is the lower class that has no food and stays hungry for days.
The words "charity" "survive" and "virtuous poverty" all help to give the full image that the speaker is trying to get across to the readers. The idea that questions why poor or lower classes can get away with things such as leaving their children to die because they have nothing else to give enable to support them, abandoning them, while the upper class or those who have, cannot get away with those types of things. We can understand that this is what the speaker is saying because of the allusion to Hansel and Gretel, where their parents left them because they could no longer "afford" keeping them. The words "pawning their bodies" and "shedding teeth" these descriptions also give off the feeling of something raw like the raw heart that was mentioned earlier in the poem. These words give the poem a more serious tone.
Overall, the poem's tone is aggressive and creates a questioning tone of why we as humans act the way we do.