Sipping the Sunset

The poem illustrates the contrast between hippo’s placid appearance and its potential for incredible fierceness.     

The poem is an acrostic. It consists of 12 lines and uses internal rhyme.  

The language is conversational. The poem uses alliteration and numerous metaphors.  

Structure, rhyme, text features, inference, main idea, mood, poetry writing

• Have a student read aloud the Up Close box and the note below it. As a class, look for the two words (river reverie).
• Ask students to glance at the ends of the poem’s lines and decide if they rhyme. (They don’t.)
  

Read the poem aloud for the class or play our audio version. Ask students what they notice about the rhymes when they hear the poem read aloud. (The ends of the lines don’t rhyme, but the middles of some lines do.)

• Think about the poem’s title and the image. What does “sip the sunset” refer to? (text features) In the image, the sunset is reflected in the water. When the hippo drinks the water, it’s “sipping the sunset.”
• Reread the first two lines. What do you think the Zambezi is? (inference) The hippo is “rooting around in the Zambezi.” The hippo is in a river, so the Zambezi is probably a river.
  
• Why do you think the poet worked the words river reverie into the acrostic structure of the poem? (structure, main idea) These words reflect the main idea of the poem. Lolling in a muddy river is a hippo’s dream.
  
• How does the mood of the poem change at the end? Why? (mood) The beginning of the poem feels happily lazy; it describes a hippo relaxing and says “what more could ever a hippo wish?” But the last two lines become urgent; the speaker tells you to “run!” This suggests that hippos can sometimes be dangerous.
  

• Have students write their own acrostic poems about an animal in its habitat.
• Draw students’ attention to lines 7-9. Prompt students to do research about the helpful relationships hippos have with birds and fish.