Leningrad Cemetery, Winter of 1941 Analysis Essay

In this poem there is a lot of figurative language. One of the biggest types of figurative language used in this poem is irony. The irony in this poem is how the mother wouldn't let her child go to march because she feared her child would get hurt. Instead she sent her child to church because she believed it was a safe and sacred place but ironically the church ended up being bombed. Another piece of figurative language that is very effective in this poem is imagery. The way the poem is written helps me create images in my head for example, "She raced through the streets of Birmingham." I can imagine her running around desperately, looking for her child. The metaphors and hyperboles in this poem also help with the imagery, for example, "...night dark hair," and "…rose-petal sweet." These metaphors make me think of the girls smoothly combed black hair and her fresh and beautiful rosy smell. A hyperbole that had a huge effect on the tone was, "But that smile was the last smile to ever come upon her face." This hyperbole really helps me understand the effect of a tragic moment like this and how it can completely ruin

The poem consists of many different uses of figurative language in order to connect snow to death. Cofer included the use of similes to allow the readers to make a connection to what she was saying, so that they could grasp a better understanding. An example of a simile can be found in lines 6-7: “the Caribbean sun winds up the world like an old alarm clock” (Cofer). The author is comparing two unlike things, the sun and an alarm clock, however they have a similar connection. The Caribbean sun is what wakes the world, just like an alarm clock does. The use of this simile adds to the poem’s meaning because it describes the life that the grandmother lives and that is warmth in her home in the Caribbean.

Sharon Olds, in her poem “Leningrad Cemetery, Winter of 1941”, portrays the dreary and dire effects of war. As one of the most destructive and longest sieges of history had just begun, the countless bodies scarred the citizens of Leningrad. In order to convey horror, hopelessness, and death, Olds utilizes simile extensively, corrupting images with typically hopeful connotation.

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.

As the poem goes on it gets deeper with meaning, sadder even. Lines four and five are the most crucial lines of the poem. Line three ends with the head giving the heart advice. “You will lose the ones you love. They will all go,” this isn’t the first thing someone wants to hear, especially not someone who is aware that they have just lost someone they love. But this is classic, logical advice that your emotions need to hear. What it means is that one day everyone you love will be gone, it is the sad truth of the world we live in. Nothing is forever. “But even the earth will go,

Bryant uses phrases such as “stern agony,” “breathless darkness,” “eternal resting place,” and “silent halls of death” to strike fear in the reader. These various phrases also apply a crucial tone to the poem. Death is a dark and distressing part of life. “The all-beholding sun shall see no more / in all his course.” (171). In these lines Bryant states that once man is complete with his course of life, he will no longer see light. This known fact raids a sense of fear of death. This next quotation states that people who die and buried will end in the same burial place, which is the ground. “Thou shalt lie down / with patriarchs of the infant world-with kings, / the powerful of the earth-the wise, the good, / fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, / all in one might sepulcher.” As previously stated, Bryant describes all people as equals. He states that everyone has the same burial place. The ground is the place all dead bodies proceed to after death. The visual form of these words arouses a sense of sadness. Throughout the poem Bryant changes the tone to state although death is a dark part of life people should enjoy life until death calls them. “So live, that when thy summons come to join / the innumerable caravan.” (172). This line supports the point of living life until death calls. Throughout the poem, Bryant uses pathos to elaborate on the elements of death.

Kenneth Slessor’s poem, Beach Burial, outlines soldiers being rolled up on to the beaches from the surf, unidentified, each being buried as an unknown seaman, irrespective of which side they were on. Slessor’s elegy for the dead soldier’s in World War Two illustrates a main message, the idea of hope and despair. Hope is that there is an afterlife and futility is what they have in common. It is the belief that once we die there is something after, something more, life does not just end. The last line of the poem, “Enlisted on the other front” suggests there is another line on the other side, an afterlife theory. The soldiers at war grasp onto any sort of hope they can, as their mortality is foreseeable. Inversely, there is a sense of complete absence and loss of hope, despair. Despair is the horrible nature of war and the wasteful nature of it, its complete uselessness. Slessor constantly refers to the idea of despair throughout the poem, “Whether as enemies they fought” and “Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall” are both examples of the concept of despair. Just as their

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

For me, the themes of the poem’s keeping moving forward and always do your best. The most interesting line’s “There’s standing tough and moving tough (14).” That line’s important because nobody should never give

In the first simile, the author gives an air of hope describing the bodies as “ stiff [cocoons] that will split down the center / when the new life inside is prepared”(10-11). Although they are dead, Olds alludes to the idea that they may be reborn again comparing them to a caterpillar and their death being a new beginning instead of an end. Oppositely, she says that most of the deceased “lay like corpses… / with no sign of peace wanting to come back”(12-16). This take on death is the exact opposite of the former, it is filled with dread and hopelessness. Both these similes act as an extended metaphor for the attitude of the author. She is conflicted between the escape of death and the life that she has built for herself. She ends the poem with the lines “even to the bread made of glue and sawdust, / even to the icy winter and the siege.”(17-18). In addition, the fact she says “most” of the corpses look as if they want to return, Olds loves her existence, even though the suffering she endures everyday is excruciating, it’s better than the nothingness that is death. Also, the author says that the bodies lay “like” corpses, this comes across as odd because one would expect bodies to do so, making this statement seem obvious. However, before she uses this simile, she uses the two others about “trees” and “cocoons” which make death seem more cerebral than it actually is. But towards the end of

“Home Burial” is mostly about a tense conversation between a husband and wife who recently buried their child. They show their grief and anger at the situation with insensitive words, such as the intimidating tone for ‘dear’. The wife is clearly upset after seeing the burial site of her child out of the window. This discovery is confronting but also fresh and meaningful as she is emotional and she wants to know why her husband is not showing grief. Frost illustrates a couple of broken structures in the poem. “What is it – what? She said. “Just that I see.” This quote is an example of the broken structure, it’s a metaphor for their relationship, which the title of the poem is also foreshadowing the collapse of their marriage. “A man must partly give up being a man with womenfolk.” This quote is juxtaposed with men and women used to show their divide between the husband and wife. “Two that don’t love can’t live together with them. But two that do can’t live together with them.” Is a paradox, it reveals the truth about their lives but they can’t resolve their broken relationship. The wife confronts the husband, “Who is that man? I didn’t know you.” This quote is visual imagery as she was looking at her husband digging the grave. She made the confronting discovery that had influenced her original thoughts of her husband. This poem links to the confronting discovery by showing the husband and wife’s different perspectives on their dead son and no matter how much the husband tries to understand her, they can’t mend their relationship. This discovery is also in “Will Grayson, Will Grayson”, as it can relate to “Home Burial” with a broken relationship. There are two Will Graysons with relationship problems with the same person, Tiny Cooper. The first Will’s relationship with Tiny is that they

Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. After graduating from Stanford she moved east to earn a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. Olds describes the completion of her doctorate as a transitional moment in her life: standing on the steps of the library at Columbia University, she vowed to become a poet, even if it meant giving up everything she had learned. The vow she made--to write her own poetry, no matter how bad it might be--freed her to develop her own voice. Olds has published eight volumes of poetry, includes The Dead and the Living (1984), The Wellspring (1996), The Gold Cell, (1987) etc. As in her earlier works, she has been praised for the courage and emotional power of her work which continues to witness pain,

Winter is a time of cold, when forests die and animals hide from the shrieking winds and biting cold. Winter is a time for survival against the odds. How apt that the speaker is struggling against the "lovely, dark and deep" woods to remember that he has "miles to go before [he] sleep[s]." The "easy wind" calls to him, and the "downy flake" beckons him to a comfortable sleep. If the speaker had paused on a bright summer day, the sleep might be just a short rest, but the poem is set on the "darkest evening of the year" while the "woods fill up with snow," and any rest taken in the "lovely, dark and deep" woods would result in the eternal sleep of death (474).

The coldness expressed in this first stanza goes beyond the literal temperature of the room. This coldness describes the ungrateful attitude of his family, none of them having ever thanked their father for his hard work in the household. This poem is written in past tense, allowing the speaker to realize the amount of regret he holds for his ingratitude. The use of the words “cold, splintering, breaking” in the second stanza reinforces the feeling of coldness in the first stanza.

In August 1942, Hitler's giant Sixth Army marched to the city that was named after Stalin. During the five-month siege, the Russians fought to hold the city and were determined to hold it at any cost. The book Stalingrad shows the roles of soldiers on both the Russian and German side, as well as fighting in inhuman conditions, and some of the experiences from civilians who were trapped in the battlefield. Written by historian and author Antony Beevor, Beevor interviewed some of the survivors and discovered new untold stories and facts in a wide range of German and Soviet archives. Some of these included prisoner interrogations and reports of desertions and executions. Many historians argue that the Battle of Stalingrad was "the turning point" of WW II in Europe. During the course of the war, changes in moods, thoughts, and impressions of the Germans, Romanians, and Soviets were easily depicted. It documents the impact on the psychological changes of the war but justifies how it changed the history of modern warfare as we know it. As a story of cruelty, courage, and human suffering, Stalingrad is extraordinary and unforgettable.