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A Mechanized War Poem

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This poem is my favorite of the three poems we have studied because of the beautiful language and poetic techniques it employs, and because of how realistically it portrays war. The poem captures the horror of troops caught in the middle of a brutal and merciless war, and their desperation. In a mechanized war, attacks take place with frightening speed and intensity, where there is no place to run or hide, and any response is not made out of logic but of pure fear. This hasty and irrational way of thinking fueled only by terror typically only ended in death for both the attacker and the defender, and severe trauma for any survivors. Using a series of present continuous verbs, the poet depicts fast evolving action. He portrays the realness …show more content…

The verb “creeping” creates a very disquitening feeling and personifies the tanks as monsters, an eerie thought. This combined with the verb topple feels very disturbing as it gives us the image of these monsterous tanks slowly sneaking towards soldiers, their prey. The movement of the poem suddenly increases on the sixth line with the words “The barrage roars and lifts”. the onomotopoeia “roars” suggests sudden movement, action, maybe even disarray, and this quickens and intensifies the poem, finally instigating action. The verbs lift further adds to this effect. Line six continues onto seven and eight with the illiterative words “Then clumsily bowed with bombs and guns and shovels and battle gear, men jostle and climb to, meet the bristling fire.” I find that these short few lines are filled with many, many beautiful poetic tecniques. Firstly I immediately see the illiteration in “bowed” “bombed” “battle gear” and “bristling”. This illiteration, especially with plosive letters, just compounds the suffering and misery of the soldiers, and the brutal, aggressive nature of war. Furthermore, the repition of the word “and” just accentuates the heaviness of the huge burden they are forced to carry. In the eigth line the word “bristle” is very aggressive, as if the men are running to their own destruction. I find the symbolism in these few …show more content…

Hope is personified as a dying soldier, hiding from the other soldiers, and desperately struggling, trying to grasp onto the mud, but miserably failing. Hope is described and “floundering” in the mud, sinking, drowning, hope itself fighting a losing battle just to survive in the hearts of the soldiers. But the soldiers all know that hope is lost and dead, and woefully plea “O! Jesus, make it stop”. The impassioned “O!” symbolizes the terror and pain they are enduring, and this line captures the desperation of these poor soldiers as they try cling onto life, onto their

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