The Portrayal of War in the Poems, The Cry of South Africa and Drummer Hodge

so well.” “They came back from the mouth of hell, all that was left of

The Universal Soldier is less of a man or human and more so the idea of every soldier combined as well as the perspective war personified. Throughout the song, the Universal Soldier is referred to as “him” and the songs depict what he is and what he does. The lines 1 and 4 are both representative of the height and age parameters for soldiers in 1961, which supports the idea that he represents all soldiers in war. The lines 22-24 depict him as the armies both Hitler and Caesar have; without both of their armies, they could not have accomplished what they did.

The poem starts with similar word choices as ‘The Soldier’ but written in the perspective of the mother. The mother tells his son that when he dies he will be in a place of ‘quietness’ and free from the ‘loss and bloodshed’. This reinforces the fact that the battlefield was full of horrors and death. The poem then moves onto how ‘men may rest themselves and dream of nought’ explaining that the soldiers do not have to fear for their lives after their death. This illustrates how they feared for their lives and had negative connotations.

The title ‘Homecoming’ is a significant contrast to the traditional universal implication of the word with the reality of the dead soldiers being brought home, to their grieving families. The word “homecoming” usually implies a heroic or reception for a great achievement however Dawe has effectively placed it to represent the death, mourning and loss of a loved one. The poet uses powerful representation to emphasise the emotional damage caused to family or friends through the loss of a loved one. The striking personification used on lines 23-24: “telegrams tremble like leaves from a wintering tree and the spider grief swings his bitter geometry”, exemplifies the arbitrary grief that affects those who receive notices. Gaining an emotional distance through the use of a third person voice, the poem enables the reader to view the tragedy in its entirety. Repeating “home, home, home” accentuates the emotional ties of the soldiers, a technique indicative of the monotony of the experiences involved in warfare. By exposing the destructive aspects of war Dawe removes war from its falsely glorified

“We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.”. Once said Maya Angelou, a poet, author, screenwriter, actress and and a civil rights activist who wrote poems intelligently and always with a gaping reason deeply within them, which made them rather fascinating. As we look back on Maya Angelou’s life, she had an incredible journey, fighting discriminations and harsh circumstances during her youth, she is truly an astonishing person who is worth of to be spoken as an important poet in history and one of the greatest in the poetic world.

army when he was 22 years old. He was injured in a shell explosion in

‘The Man He Killed’ was written in the nineteenth century during the Boer War that took place in South Africa in 1898. This war was because the British Empire wanted to take control over the land because of its rich gold and diamonds. The poem is written in a conversational tone, with speech marks, making us feel that the soldier is talking directly to us reminiscing about killing a “foe” whilst at war. The speaker in this poem is a man of low class who was unemployed and had already sold all his possessions and consequently had no choice but to join the army; this can be seen when the man states “just as I- was out of work-had sold his traps”. Hardy is showing us that some people join the army just out of desperation not because they believe in the political side of war. These unemployed, low classed people have no other way of earning the money to help them survive so they turn to the only other option the have- joining the army. The speaker is forced to kill another man which he claims was his ‘foe’ and later on realises that he and the man had a lot in common.

Thanks to the war, the early 20th century was a time of massive social and political change and many values and structures of the 19th century were discarded. This is also shown in how poetry was structured, as in Edward Thomas’ poem As the Team’s Head-Brass, he disregards the strict poetry structures, such as the sonnet, for a more stream-of-consciousness style, rich with dialogue. Poetry was developing and changing,

In this essay I will be comparing the two poems, ‘The Man He Killed’ by Thomas Hardy and ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen. ‘The Man He Killed’ is about a man who was in the war and is thinking about his memories in the war. The main part of his experience in the war that he is reminiscing is the killing that he committed and the majority of the poem is focused on that. Thomas Hardy did not go to war himself but it could be thought that he got the idea from a friends experience in the war. The poem is based on the Boer War. The message of the poem is that he was most probably very similar to the man he killed, as in not really knowing what they’re fighting for and why they’re there. ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ is about someone who is

As said before, Hardy’s and Yeats poems, both, explore the terrors of war, however, they were written at different times and in different tones. Time, to go farther into depth, Thomas Hardy wrote “Channel Firing” in the year of 1914, which is the year

In my understanding, the poem pre-dominates the theme “horrors of slavery”. The poet, in a clear tone, illustrates the lives of slaves and the challenges they go through. “And the mother’s shriek of wild despair”, “And I saw her babes torn from her breast” and “If I saw young girls from their mother’s arms” are some examples of indignities that the poet describes. The persona states that she could not rest in a place where people were forcefully subjected to any form of indignities. She uses statements such as; “I could not rest if I heard the tread”, “Of a coffle gang to the shambles led” and much more to elaborate her dislike against slavery; the abuse and terror.

In this essay we will look into her life through three of her poems in

I haven’t always loved poetry, but after reading poems that have such moving stories to tell it hasn’t been hard to grow a certain fondness for them. Poetry is the telling of stories from the creative and sometimes hauntingly realistic words of a poet. The world of poetry can be wonderful. It can also be saddening, exhilarating or wonderfully exciting and the most eloquent poems can leave anybody rewinding over the story of the poem for a time afterwards. Wilfred Owen was a poet who became well renowned after World War I where he unfortunately died in battle. Anthem for Doomed Youth (Anthem) and Dulce Et Decorum Est (Dulce) by Wilfred Owen both portray various themes including horrors of war, the futility of war and the pity and sadness of

Thomas Hardy was born into a religious family and brought up with very Christian values and morals. As he matured and was exposed to the new ideas of the time, he became conflicted in his views about God and religion.  He was criticized for writings that many of his peers considered to be obscene, immoral and blasphemous. Throughout his adult life, Hardy considered himself to be an agnostic. His poems show that he was much more complicated than that. His writings show a Christian who was tormented by the fact that he was no longer able to believe in the church doctrine. He had a conflicted soul that was searching for some meaning.  This is evident in his poetry,

Sir Thomas Wyatt was born in the year 1503. The son of Sir Henry Wyatt and Anne Skinner, he went on to attend St. John’s College in Cambridge. He first took a place in the court of King Henry VIII in 1516. In the year 1520 he was married to Elizabeth Brooke at the age of seventeen. His son, of the same name, was born in the year 1521. Wyatt’s marriage to Elizabeth was miserable and the couple is believed to have been “estranged by the second half of the 1520s” (Burrow). Thomas Wyatt and Elizabeth Brooke were separated in 1525 when Wyatt accused his wife of adultery. Much of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poetry is reflective of his love life. His personal relationships served as inspiration for a notable amount of his work. In his poem “Blame not my