Summary Of Facing It By Yusef Komunyakaa

“Facing It” by the American black poet Yusef Komunyakaa of Shreveport is written with the use of visual images. Yusef Komunyakaa writes about one of his many trips to the Vietnam's Veteran's Memorial in Washington DC. This Memorial is a long polished slab of black reflectant granite with the names of all the US soldiers who lost their lives in Vietnam. Yusef says “my black face fades, hiding inside the black granite”. Here Yusef uses his reflection in the wall to bring the reader back to the war and how he feels standing at the wall now. He makes his feeling ambiguous and give the reader the opportuntity to decide what he is feeling through his use of viual images.

“Facing it” by Yusef Komunyakaa and “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, are two powerful poems with the graphical life like images on the reality of war. It is apparent that the authors was a soldier who experienced some of the most gruesome images of World War I. In “Ducle et Decorum Est” Owen tells us about a personal experience in which he survived a chemical warfare attack. Although he survives, some of his fellow troops do not. As in “Facing It” Komunyakaa is also a soldier who has survived a war. Komunyakaa response to his war experience is deeply shaped by his visit to Lin’s memorial. Inspired by the monument, Komunyakaa confronts his conflicted feelings about Vietnam, its legacy, and even more broadly, the part race plays in

Remembering memories is preferred, rather than living in reality. In the poem, we witness a woman remembering her high school idol, and she decides in the end to not go and talk to him. It is evident that the woman in the poem prefers her memory rather than the view that reality is showing her, this is shown when the woman refuses to go and meet the “hero she had as a girl”, despite giving herself a realistic reason why she should go and greet him, “you think how easy it would be to walk right over and tap him on the shoulder[, and] say hello” but she doesn’t. She doesn’t go and greet him because her memory remembers him as someone amazing, and admirable, “taller than the boys in your own class[,] taller even than your brothers”; where height is a reflection of her admiration. But her hero is now “fat and balding”, and to go greet him now would warp her perspective of her hero, from someone to idolise, to someone pathetic. In the end, she chooses to just remember him just the way she wants to, rather than remembering him the way reality does, showing that memories are preferred over reality. The woman also chooses not to talk to him because of her personal desire to retain her views and opinions of not only how she sees her hero, but also how

Cruel and terrible events forever leave a mark on our memory. Especially, when these events are directly related to person, the memory reproduces every second of what happened. Unfortunately, humanity fully cognized the term of "war". "Facing it" by Yusef Komunyakaa reveals another several sides of the war. Poem tells the reader about which consequences, the war left and how changed people's lives. The hero identifies itself with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, mourns all those killed and who did not return. That is why the poem is dramatic. War has become a part of the hero's life, even after the ending.

In his poem, “Facing It”, Yusef Komunyakaa describes his ambivalent emotions towards the Vietnam War of which he was a veteran. Reflecting on his experiences, Yusef expresses his conflicting feelings about the Vietnam War and his feelings about how racism has played a part in America’s history. By using visual imagery and metaphoric language throughout the poem, Yusef is able to reflect the sad and confused emotions he felt while visiting the Vietnam memorial.

The poem describes the life of a man during the Vietnam War, a conflict involving the United States and local Vietnamese who supported a communist regime, and how unexplainable sporadic events saved his life. He gives thanks to an unknown force that saves his life multiple times throughout his tour in Vietnam because the instances are what some people consider luck and others and act of a higher being or deity. Throughout the poem he expresses his gratitude towards the entity that watches over him but later he questions the existence of a god because why would one allow there to be a war in the first place and then send

The poem “Thanks,” by Yusef Komunyakaa, in the literal sense, is a poem poised in the midst of a “deadly game,” where the narrator keeps barely escaping death in multiple occurances. Through the usage of extended metaphor, literary devices, juxtaposition and Komunyakaa’s own experiences of the Vietnam War, the poem accomplishes a solemn tone for the piece as a whole. This solemn tone establishes an abusive relationship created in the poem between the two children, America and Vietnam, and the Mother of All, Earth.

The word “homecoming” is universally associated with a celebration of the returned and is linked to feelings of happiness and anticipation. Dawe however, employs this word ironically as the “homecoming” described in the poem correlates to the death and mourning of the soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War and depicts the arrival of their nameless bodies. Through establishing this irony Dawe is about to effectively capture the brutal reality of war and highlight the emotional trauma associated with its dehumanising

Yusef Komunyakaa, born in 1947, wrote both February in Sydney and Facing it. These poems were written as a way of “talking around an idea or question,” this idea/ question being that of growing up during the civil rights movement. His poetical technique makes his opinions stand out, being affluencial because although poems contain less words they often have a more powerful appeal. Komunyakaa was especially influenced by jazz and the time that he served in the Vietnam War. He creates his poem February In Sydney to mimic that freedom that he felt through jazz similar to that of meditation. In Facing it he bases the poem on flashbacks of the war while visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It” is a lyrical poem about a Vietnam veteran reflecting back to the Vietnam War. Komunyakaa uses types of figurative language to show the different emotions and experiences he went through upon visiting the Vietnam Memorial. Throughout the poem he expresses his feelings on the war and concludes that as humans, we must eventually move on from this tragic event. Komunyakaa uses personification, metaphors, and powerful imagery to reflect on the painful and confusing emotions that he was going through while at the memorial.

The destruction of war causes so much pain in most people’s hearts. When people picture the destruction of cities and landscapes from wars it’s a lost feeling inside of hopelessness. War has an emotional and physical devastation that cannot be rivaled. In the poem “Facing It” by Yusef Konmunyakaa shows more of an emotional side of wars compared to “Six National Guards Blown Up Together” by Peg Lauber shows more of a physical and emotional side. This writer is contrasting both of the poems based on the imagery of the destruction of human life.

The poems convey a valid belligerent meaning of what war is and what it can do to an individual. “Facing It” reflects on the aftermath of war. The poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” reveals what war was like in the soldier’s eyes and how war should be handled by any fighting side. The author, Komunyakaa, uses rhetorical devices: imagery, diction, and similes to explain the flashbacks he sees as he conveys his meaning. The author’s flashbacks emphasizes the benevolent and belligerent effects of war, “I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke.

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

causes the poem to flow, and thus lightens up the dark and serious issue of war. The lines "But ranged as infantry, And staring face to face, I shot at him as he at me, And killed him in his place." are easy to read; however, their meaning is extremely

When a battle is over, the field on which it was fought must look like a wound on the face of the earth: the blood-soaked ground strewn with bodies, lying in mud churned by thousands of marching feet. Eventually, grass grows over the battlefield, hiding the evidence of the horrors that took place there under a blanket of green. In years to come, the area appears so unremarkable that passersby have no indication of what took place there. However, without remembrance, what is to stop history from continually repeating itself? Carl Sandburg, in his poem Grass, uses the imperative tense, proper nouns, and tension between the first person and the third person points of view to show that humanity repeats its mistakes because nature always conceals them.