“I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.”
The metaphor 'I am like an owl of the wilderness' introduces a series of animal comparisons that expand the speaker's desolation beyond the personal to the cosmic-ontological. The owl of the wilderness is a creature of isolation and nighttime, associated with desolation and ruin (Isaiah 34:11; Isaiah 43:20). The simile suggests that the speaker is not merely alone but has become a being suited to wastelands, a creature of the margins. The singular focus on one animal, rather than a collection, emphasizes total identification with a single existential condition: isolation and abandonment. This verse stretches the first-person lament to incorporate animal otherness, suggesting that suffering has made the speaker not quite human, belonging now to a different order of beings. Yet this very alienation becomes the condition for addressing God, for the wilderness creature's cry pierces silence.
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