War impacts a lot of people; it destroys lives, it destroys innocence. Thousands of lives are lost, thousands of innocent people die because of hatred and the needs for power. The poem "Disabled" and the text "The Last Night" are both based on war and the destruction that war causes: losing lives, losing families, losing body parts and losing innocence. "Disabled" and "The Last Night" both convey the impact of war on the young, innocent people. "Disabled" conveys the message of soldiers losing themselves and remembering who they used to be before the war and "The Last Night" tells a sad story about two brothers who have lost their parents and are being taken to the concentration camp. It relays the sadness and the loss of their youth and innocence. …show more content…
It is written in third person and set during the Second World War. It is about adults and children waiting in a cramped area to be taken to the concentration camps. The atmosphere in the room is sorrowful and tense yet peaceful at the same time. The author depicts the innocence of the children though the line “the children were spared the last hours of the wait by their ability to fall asleep where they lay, to dream of other places”. The fact that the children could easily fall asleep and dream suggests their innocence and purity, how they are not completely aware of what’s to come. They dream of other places because the place they are in now, is not somewhere they would want to be. The phrase “dreaming of other places” also installs comfort and amenity for the children as they know that they are not home. The need for sleep and comfort reinforces how the soldier in “Disabled” waited until sleep had “mothered” him. However, the “adults refused to drink because they knew it meant breakfast, and therefore departure”. This proves that the adults knew exactly what would happen the next day and that they were dreading for their departure, where they knew that everyone was eventually going to die. The adults prove to be more understanding and knowledgeable about the situation, so much that they aren’t even able to sleep, whilst the children are naive and clueless about where they are going. The title “The Last Night” interprets …show more content…
Both pieces suggested that the war had the biggest impact on the younger generation as it destroyed the rest of their lives if they managed to survive or took away their chance at life if they were killed in the war. The young people were the ones who were innocent and naive, oblivious as to what the war was capable of. The soldier in “Disabled” let one foolish mistake destroy the rest of his life, a decision that was led on by vanity, ignorance, innocence and naivety; a choice that affected the rest of his life. The two brothers in “The Last Night” were also young and innocent but they were unfairly punished for no reason. They were both credulous on how their sibling bond would soon be broken as they would probably be separated in the concentration camps. Unfortunately, both authors relay the realities of war, how misguided the soldiers were when joining the army and how war ruined the lives of the
Scared, facing the door of death every day, make one bad move and it’s all over and your only reason to stay alive is because of the idea of being free. In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, he uses Irony, imagery and foreshadowing to illustrate the Holocaust. The author shows how hard it was to be a normal teenager, to be captured by the nazis, and then having to work in the concentration camp. This novel shows how many loving families got split up in the concentration camp to never see each other again and how terrible the Holocaust was.
War is a horrible and devastating event that hurts many people in many ways. This something many people have to cope with. Authors are among those who have to cope with war as well. Many people cope different ways but authors cope by protesting war. To do this authors use imagery, irony, and structure.
During times of war, it is inevitable for loss to be experienced by all. In the poems “The Black Rat” and “The Photograph” written by Iris Clayton and Peter Kocan respectively, the idea of loss is explored through an omniscient narrator recalling a soldier’s involvement in warfare. While Clayton writes of a soldier’s abrupt loss of hope and how this experience negatively affects his life, Kocan explores how the loss of a loved one affects a family sixty years later. While both poems incorporate similar techniques in imagery and narration, the time setting for each poem is different as “The Black Rat” is set in Tobruk, Libya during World War 2 and “The Photograph” is set during World War 1.
Even though the soldiers join the war as naive youths, the war rapidly changes them and they develop into young men. Surrounded by death, the boys are bound to foresee the fragility of their own lives and are stripped of the carelessness and brazenness of youth. The dreadful horrors around the boys bound them to consider a world that does not accommodate to their childish and simplistic view. They want to only see a separation between what is right and what is wrong, they instead find moral doubt. Where they had wanted to see order and meaning, they only found senselessness and disorder. Where they wanted to find heroism, they only found the selfish instinct of self-preservation. These realizations destroyed the innocence of the boys, maturing and thrusting them into their manhood.
This internal war starts the second that you set foot in this unknown word as a baby, all the way up to the last step you take to say your last goodbyes to this world. The poem begins with a life of a child in whom people around him tended to call the child “...crybaby or poor or fatty or crazy and made [the child] an alien…”(Sexton), and the child “...drank their acid and concealed it.”(Sexton) illustrating how painful it is, not react and take actions,but counseling is the best method the child seemed fit. Furthermore, courage in a person can also cause a war, in which the author shows the imagery, how the child’s “...courage was a small coal that [the child] kept swallowing.”(Sexton) and encouraging to society to make his own future. As an adult, the person endured many difficulties, such as the of enduring “...a great despair…”(Sexton), but you didn’t do it with a companion but rather “...did it alone.”(Sexton) and endured that suffering within yourself. Being an adult is not only passing a time with your loved ones and remembering the ones that sacrificed their time to make you who you are now, from your teachers to your peers to your parents, but to actually live your life the fullest and make each day worth living.Until the last moment that has been waiting since the beginning in which the death “...opens the back door...” and “...[the adult will] put on [his] carpet slippers and stride out.”(Sexton), exemplifying how all you have done, from engulfing the pain given by the society to living your whole life just to see a tear of happiness from seeing your grandchild, will not be taken with you at the moment when you really need it the
The collection of poems “Theater”, “Water”, and “Safe House” by Solmaz Sharif shows the varied viewpoints of how war affects the speakers and how death is all too common in the midst of warfare. The author uses a spectrum of literary techniques to enhance the experience of the reader, so we can fully grasp the severity of each speaker’s plight. All of Sharif’s poems differ in form with the use of white space and indentations in “Theater”, colons in “Water”, and a style of abecedarian using the letter S in “Safe House”. While her diverse use of forms generate different emotions from the reader, they share the same notion of how violence is problematic. Each poem has a unique outlook to the sight of war: “Theater” being in the position of a victim and an assailant of war, “Water” explaining a war mission and fatalities in terse terms, and “Safe House” as an observer of an activist against war. Sharif’s strategy to exemplify the effects of how war affects the victim and the civilian is particularly critical because mass media tends to hide the collateral damage of war and only illustrates why we should attack the “enemy”. Another approach the author uses to critique the speakers central conflicts is by arranging words from the US Department of Defense 's Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, to concur with the message of the several ways war influences the lives of those who are unwillingly encompassed by it. Sharif uses poetry as an outlet to show the underlying tone
In “September, 1918”, Amy Lowell shows her readers an interesting and illuminating poem. That war can be an ugly time and the people that experience it often seems to live in a “broken world” (19). To fight an evil, sometimes war is needed, nonetheless it is still costly to the people living through the war. Some in a literal sense, like soldiers fighting in a war, while some in a physical sense by the world that they now see and live in. I find the poem truly interesting though, in how the author shows that even in war we can still hold onto hope for more promising days. Lowell portrays a melancholy mood throughout her poem that makes her readers thinking about war but also the hope of it being over.
There exist only two types of people in a time of war and crisis, those who survive and those who die. Elie Wiesel’s novel, Night shows how Elie, himself, faces difficult problems and struggles to survive World War II. Wilfred Owen’s poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est”, tells a story about a young soldier thinking of himself before others during World War I. The poem “Mary Hamilton” shows how a mother killed her child so she would not get into trouble. Sir John Harrington writes about a sad truth in the poem “On Treason”; the poem reflects humanity’s selfish tendencies during tough times. When people face difficult times they often care about only one person, themselves; the need to survive clouds people’s moral and judgment.
All Quiet on the Western Front and Night are two novels that talk about wars and author’s experiences. They are different in author’s perspective which All Quiet on the Western was written in a German soldier’s view and Night was in Jewish people’s view, one is the warrior and one is the victim. Despite those differences, these works share the same idea of the dehumanization of war and how it can physically and mentally affect people by using real events and ironic writing style.
Throughout this poem, the Sanburg intentionally uses the concrete and proper nouns to represent the death that occurs over time in a war zone. These concrete nouns represent the extreme conditions that happen while at war. The use of the word “bodies”(1) starts off the poem on a somber note, by simply representing the amount of people that have passed. Furthermore, the concrete nouns represent how some of these battles dragged on through the use and repeat of the word, “years.”(7) The catastrophic effects of war on the landscape is exemplified by the passengers asking, “What place is this?”(8) The people that come back to these war-stricken areas do not even recognize where they are in because it has been so badly devastated. Similarly, the
Poets frequently utilize vivid images to further depict the overall meaning of their works. The imagery in “& the War Was in Its Infancy Then,” by Maurice Emerson Decaul, conveys mental images in the reader’s mind that shows the physical damage of war with the addition of the emotional effect it has on a person. The reader can conclude the speaker is a soldier because the poem is written from a soldier’s point of view, someone who had to have been a first hand witness. The poem is about a man who is emotionally damaged due to war and has had to learn to cope with his surroundings. By use of imagery the reader gets a deeper sense of how the man felt during the war. Through the use of imagery, tone, and deeper meaning, Decaul shows us the
Although the subject of nightmare is only in two lines of the whole poem, this minor contribution is highly effective for it allows the audience access to the traumatising aftermath of the horrors of war.
The poem presents key issues inflicted by oppression such as concentration camps, starvation, disease, and children dying. In the first line of the second stanza, she has written “Today a father’s heartbeat tells his fright…Now children choke and die of typhus here”. Eva has communicated to us that the parents in the Nazi ghettos are not afraid of themselves dying; but instead, their children sufferingly dying. There is nothing worse that losing one that you have brought into this world. The parents are in a constant struggle in trying to save their children from disease and starvation.
In looking at the view of war presented in Disabled, there are a number of key themes. Firstly the perspective of the poet and how he presents his feelings about war is demonstrated in the language and structure of the poem. This includes the use of tone and rhyming scheme and erratic rhythmic structure. Secondly, the poem uses a single character as a key motif used to exemplify the characteristics of war. Thirdly, the use of a third person narrative reflects a significant distancing from the subject matter. Some violent imagery is also introduced to present the realities of war. Mainly the viewpoint of war is seen in its aftermath in the attitudes and feelings that remain after war and also through comparison with the times before the war. Each of these will be examined in turn in answering this question.
Both ‘Disabled’ and ‘Refugee Blues’ express their perspective towards the subject differently, although the two poems are on the same side in terms of anti-war arguments. They both agree that war destroyed the lives of many. Both narrators in each poem have lost something vital to their happiness. In ‘Disabled’ it looks at war using a dark, depressing and disturbing manner, “He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark, And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey…”. In contrast, ‘Refugee Blues’ looks at how unfair the war was and how it left many with nothing and whilst the tone is one of sadness and regret there is no despair and the author recognizes that there is still hope and beauty in the world in the form of nature, “Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees; They had no politicians and sang at their ease; They