Homecoming Donald Bruce Dawe Essay

In the second stanza the distinctive experience of power is present. The use of the technique of imagery and emotive words “to pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows’ tells us that the soldiers were strong, loyal and had enough power within a degree to assist fellow soldiers. The use of personification to create sound “sob and clubbing of the gunfire” This leads the audience to understand what the soldiers were up against without even directly saying it. The imagery visually shows the scene in their

“They’re fighting harder than ever but are they fighting for?” 50,000 Australians including ground troopers, navy and air force personnel served in Vietnam between 1962 and 1972. 520 died and 2,400 were wounded. Homecoming by Bruce Dawe is set in the Vietnam War era. It tells his negative views towards the hopeless loss of life during the period. It talks about the Australians that have died overseas and their body’s being taken home to their grieving families. It emphasises the waste of life and impact of death wars have on families, friends and colleges of the fallen and still fighting.

At the conclusion of the poem, Dawe emphasized that there is no point of bringing the green bodies to their families because nothing would change and the soldiers will not return to life, he shows his opinion by exploring the paradox in “they’re bringing them home, now, too late, too early” which highlights the family misery after bringing the dead bodies.

The concluding line in Bruce Dawe’s “The Homecoming”, complements the respectful and, at times, resentful tone the speaker adopts. Opening with a comparatively broad statement; “they are bringing them home” – alludes to the story of the soldiers’ decent home. Moreover, by utilising the phrase “they”, the anonymity of the soldiers is also augmented, leaving the reader to again question who exactly “they” are. Being brought “home” – a place that symbolises love/family, was a nationwide debate at the time of the Vietnam War. Protests were all over the country, arguing for the return of our soldiers to safety. Only this wasn’t about the soldiers’ family - they were dead – home was just a way of saying: out of danger. A long pause, then follows,

The speaker of the piece, you would think is soldier witnessing what it is like when being brave and bringing home the victory. The title would makes me think of something proudly arriving. When talking about returning home it is usually of celebration. Soldiers must maintain a certain mindset when in fighting for their country is what I believe the poem is about. It could be talking about the past, during slavery times with white masters, describing their lifestyle. There was only a time period where people had white masters, the suffering still exist so this is considered a timeless issue. I come by this meaning when referring to the text saying that whose white masters. The structure of this poem complexly uses metaphors to tell of several different situations.

War is an action which causes grave impacts to those who come into contact to it. There is nothing positive that comes out of war. To one side it is a sorrowful grievance while the other side is a bitter sweet victory. Ernest Hemmingway’s Soldier’s Home portrays what soldiers feel when they come home, trying to return to their pervious selves. In conjunction to Hemingway, Carl Sandburg’s poem, Grass, demonstrates what the land as well as the civilians react to war occurring.

Inside this soldier’s kit were thirty-seven poems written during the war. One of the poems, titled “When you see millions of the mouthless dead” instills the reader with the powerful realization of impending death. This poem, at face value, can be taken as a basic "How To" guide for mourning the loss of lives during war times. However, with further

The plot of the poem is about war and the death of a Turret Gunner in the belly of a fighter plan. The poem describes the death of the gunner during the war, and he’s drafted to fight for the United States of America during the war. Jarrell describes the fighter plan when he says “ six miles from earth, loosed from it’s dream of life” (line 3), meaning he is in the air fighting and far away from the life he once lived. Jarrell describes the belly of the plane as a cold and wet by stating, “And I haunched in its belly till my fur wet froze” (line 2). Being at war is a dark gloomy time of a soldiers life, and is more like a nightmare than reality described when Jarrell says, “I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters” ( line 4). In

Throughout his poem, Dawe discuss the senselessness of war and absence of identity that these young soldiers face - he explores this through a use of effective techniques such as irony, repetition, symbolism, metaphors and rhythm. Through the use of simile and metaphor in the quote ‘telegrams tremble like leaves from a wintering tree…the spider grief swings in his bitter geometry’, Dawe portrays the coldness of death and spreading of grief throughout the community. Repetition of the suffix ‘-in’ in ‘bringing’, ‘zipping’, ‘picking’, ‘tagging’, and ‘giving’, describing the actions of the body processors, establishes

There is a consistency that shows the war creates a confusion and a type of disorganization that can not be solved easily. The articulation of this poem gives it a substantial understanding that reinforces the idea of grieving the dead, but also gives a comparison between both life and war. “Shiloh- A Requiem” written by Herman Melville has a deep meaning that portrays the aftermath of the Battle of Shiloh. The tone, word choice, imagery, metaphors, and rhyme of the poem all contribute to the idea that war is a forceful act of equalizing. It emphasizes the idea that war is a baffling and physically damaging and at the end of the war, all the soldier has left to deal with is the aftermath of it all, the morning

Patriotism in this poem may seem a little odd. When you fight in a war you often are fighting over something. In this poem it appears that the soldiers are not fighting for anything particular just fighting to fight. After all in the poem it talks about how they were born to “drill and die.” The significance of the war and how that refer to the people as makes it seem like there familys shouldn't even be sad because they were only born to

Wilfred Owen’s poem, “The Send-Off” was written at Ripon where there was a huge army camp. The troops in the poem have just come from a sending-off ceremony of cheering crowds, bells, drums, and flowers given by strangers; the troops are now being packed into trains for an unknown destination. From the beginning of the poem the atmosphere is sinister, the lanes are “darkening” and claustrophobic, the crowds have gone and the troops are watched only by the “dull” and uninspiring faces of a porter and lowly tramp. The flowers pinned on the chests of the soldiers in celebration become for the speaker of the poem the funeral flowers garlanding the soldiers for the slaughter that awaits them in war. The departure of the soldiers for war is secret, it is “like wrongs hushed up”, the cheering celebration of the hours before becomes a smoke screen for the harsh solemnity of war.

How would you feel to have a father, mother, sister or brother taken away because of the treachery war .Good morning Mrs Naidoo and fellow classmates, today I will be analysing Christopher Wallace-Crabbe’s Australian War poem Other people and how it highlights how it has impacted the reader in offering insights on the Australian context. This poem discuss the futility during the First World War and war in general. I find this poem ‘other people’ is interesting because it foreshadows the darker side to war.

In the second half of the poem, the poem is more angry, with contrasts between the poet and the dying soldiers, then the soldiers and the

Even by examining the title we sense that feeling of dread and hopelessness. Throughout the poem the author talks about how all the soldiers are really on the same side. In both paragraph three and five he repeats the line, “The dead are all on the same side.” By this he means that in death they all end up in the same place no matter what side they were on. They end up “dead lain cheek to cheek” and “their hair veneered with clotted blood.” Through these words you see the truth of the war which is that in the end everyone was a looser and everyone lost a shred of