War – it isn’t desired by anyone. If we can, we try to avoid it as much as possible. But there are times when war can’t be avoided. This fighting ultimately leads to thousands of innocent lives lost – men, women and children. We grieve their deaths, we mourn their deaths and we feel saddened by their deaths. Poetry can help alleviate this saddened feeling. It can help us to feel happier in times of great depression and stress. Some poems however strike the heart of war and the horrors related to it. The poets can express their points of view on war, conscriptions or the propagandas in a dark manner and create a gloomy atmosphere. One of these poems is part of David Lockyer’s War Limericks. As the title suggests, this poem is a limerick with sound and visual language used to boost the poems meaning.
The theme of Lockyer’s poem is the B-17, a bomber which flew for the United States Army Air Corps in World War II. In this poem, Lockyer is trying to express his own point of view
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In the poem, Lockyer is expressing the success of the B-17 bomber in World War II. The bomber was a relatively large airframe measuring in at a wingspan of 32 metres and an overall length of 21 metres. Because of this, he compares the B-17 to a castle, saying it was “a castle in the air.” He also calls the B-17 a “flying fortress.” This name again gives us a visual image of just how large this bomber was.
Speaking of a “flying fortress,” this is one example of sound language that Lockyer has used. It is a form of alliteration and helps to flow the poem. It helps to emphasise the idea of the B-17 being a castle in the sky. Alliteration also adds to the rhythm of a poem and in a limerick this is all the more important. Because this poem is a limerick, it contains an AABBA rhyme and rhythm pattern. Rhyme and rhythm in a poem are important because they provide the heartbeat of the poem to which it can flow
Whether it’s war or terrorism, children who want to grow securely is living amongst the affected nation. War is obliterating those talented individuals in their childhood who can radically transform the world itself. The two disputed countries may also have justifications to protect the welfares of their own people. There can be wealth and nuclear weapons to demolish this world as a whole. However, peacefully negotiated approach is coveted to compromise on each other. No country can rationalize weapons of mass obliteration and debacles. Often, it is a foolish decision of the pioneers of the country, making it a pretext for the combat. It’s the upright soldiers and their families who need to survive the demise and serious injuries from the weapons. For the last centuries, the spontaneous overflow of poetry has portrayed human emotions concerning wide range of universal issues. Both the poets Donald Bruce Dawe and Wilfred Owen exemplify this cataclysm of losing your families and the conditions the soldiers face, through their notable poems Homecoming and Dulce et Decorum Est.
In the middle of the poem, the speaker arrives at the number of casualties from the war. When he reads this number he can’t believe that he is still alive. As he reads down the names he uses the visual imagery and simile to describe how he expected to find his own name in “letters like smoke” (line 16). This helps the reader understand how lucky the speaker felt about somehow escaping the war still alive. As he goes
The speaker's life before war is left far below and even feels like an illusion. Like a "dream," it is gone. When the speaker “woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters”, he woke up to his worst nightmare, enemy fighters approaching the bomber. If we take a close look at lines three and four together, there is a stark contrast. Line three is very peaceful and serene, the words “dream”, “life”, and “earth” usually have positive connotations; while line four is certain death, with words like “nightmare” and “black flak”. The last line of the poem is very straightforward, and is almost prose. It tells us exactly what we need to know. When the bomber got back to the base, they cleaned the speakers remains out of the turret with a hose. If we continue the metaphor of the bomber being the mother, we can conclude that the speaker is being born into death through the womb of “the State”.
The poem also uses end rhyme to add a certain rhythm to the poem as a whole. And the scheme he employs: aabbc, aabd, aabbad. End rhyme, in this poem, serves to effectively pull the reader through to the end of the poem. By pairing it with lines restricted to eight syllables. The narrator creates an almost nursery-rhyme like rhythm. In his third stanza however, his last line, cutting short of eight syllables, stands with an emphatic four syllables. Again, in the last stanza, he utilizes the same technique for the last line of the poem. The narrator’s awareness of rhyme and syllable structure provides the perfect bone structure for his poem’s rhythm.
The style of “Belfast confetti” is structured in terms of stanzas but it does not follow a rhyming pattern, it has a long line of writing then the next line is short and cycles through this throughout the poem. The reason he choose this style was so that it gets them poem moving fast but then a pause.
To better understand this poem some history about London during the time the poem was written is helpful. London was the “. . . undisputed cultural, economic, religious, educational, and political center” of England in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. It was a city of “warehouses, docks, factories, prisons,
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.
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
Repetition is another key poetic device used in the poem, and considering its effect on the reader gives insight as to what the speaker may be emphasizing as significant. The word “dread” is repeated several times throughout the poem, specifically in lines 12 and 15. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “feared greatly…dreadful, terrible.” Because this word is used so many times, it draws the reader’s attention and contributes even more to the imagery of the Tyger. The repetition of the first stanza forms a sort of introduction and conclusion. The few differences between them get the reader’s attention and point out significant ideas that go along with the meaning of the poem. The comma in line 21 shows hesitation, and the colon in line 22 commands the attention of the Tyger as the speaker
The author of the poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” purposely writes it without a fixed structure of rhythm or rhyme. Composing strict metrical patterns or rhyme schemes
Wilfred Owen can be considered as one of the finest war poets of all times. His war poems, a collection of works composed between January 1917, when he was first sent to the Western Front, and November 1918, when he was killed in action, use a variety of poetic techniques to allow the reader to empathise with his world, situation, emotions and thoughts. The sonnet form, para-rhymes, ironic titles, voice, and various imagery used by Owen grasp the prominent central idea of the complete futility of war as well as explore underlying themes such as the massive waste of young lives, the horrors of war, the hopelessness of war and the loss of religion. These can be seen in the three poems, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ and
By using repeating sound of words starting with same letter, it makes the reader easy to imagine the image of the war. In ‘Exposure’, he says ‘Flowing flakes the flocks’. It slows down speed the tempo of the poem so it keeps a poetic ‘pause’ in this quote. By having a time for the poetic ‘pause’, it creates the connotation to increase the tension among the poem and to make the reader to feel the sense of tension from the poem. Also, with ‘Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’ in ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, it catches the reader’s attention and builds the intensity by the ‘r’ sound in this quote. The ‘r’ sound raises the momentum of the poem. Reading ‘rifles’ rapid rattle’ gives the sound of the rifles shooting in the battlefield. Wilfred Owen strongly indicates his anti-war feeling from the alteration. This quotation explains the rifles of the guns take the soldier’s life and the endless gunfight even though the soldiers die. There is no rites or prayers for
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
Overall, I think that that this poem explores the relationship of the father and the son in a way which Vernon Scannell can talk about his past experience in being in the war which gives the reader an opportunity to look at the poem from a different perspective. Scannell has written this poem in retrospect in the past and the poem itself, in its narrative tone, shows the reader two different stories that are symbolised into one poem.
Rhyme is found all throughout the poem and has a huge effect on the reader. Blake used rhyme and detail to create some more wicked thoughts of the Tyger in the readers mind. Each stanza is made up of two couplets. Because these couplets keep a steady going rhyme, we