Thomas Hardy Syntax

In the blank space before the third stanza we infer that the woman has killed the flea. He is upset at the woman because she killed the flea and wants to know how this flea was guilty. The tone of the poem changes in this stanza because now, he is chastising her for her sins. He is even cool and harsh when he says, “Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me, /Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee” (26-27) He then concludes by explaining that having sex with him would be just as trivial as killing the flea.

The similar theme is that war changes people and tears them apart due to the pain and suffering of the war. “Cursing the war, cursing himself, cursing everybody”(O’Flaherty 208). The quote helps show that the war may cause you to curse things you never would've before, like, yourself. And from the poem “He thought he’d list perhaps/ Off hand like just as I/ Was out of work, had sold his traps/ No other reason why”(Hardy 16-20). This tells how war can force people to make erratic decisions, it changes your attitude and morals about any situation including joining the army and going to war. The difference between the two stories is that in “The Sniper” it turns him against his family and in “The Man He Killed” it turned the soldier against his friends. To prove this, “Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother's face”(O’Flaherty, page 208). Again this tells of the shock the sniper received when he saw it was his brother he had killed. But in the opposing story “Yes, quaint and curious war is!/ You shoot a fellow down/ You’d treat if met where any bar is/ Or help to half-a-crown”(Hardy 17-20). It explains of how he killed a man that the soldier would have befriended in any other situation. All in all, you can see both the similarities and differences in both stories

The second stanza, though only two lines in length and undifferentiate by lack of punctuation, carries a powerful message. the cowboy's virtue is directly compared to the dangerous, criminal potential of a bullet in a simile

The author was giving a message then at the end of the poem it changes. He was giving the message that war happens to everybody and that they will have to go to war at some point in there life. The problem is that they don’t know the bourdon that it puts on the people that he has supported and been supported by until his son is sent of. He gets a totally different feeling when he doesn’t know what could happen to his son. He gets his message across by proving that every body has something to do with war wether they like it or not. Your parents might have been to war, if not them then your uncles, cousins, friends, or your neighbors(old men). Then if it isn’t them it could be your child who is going and the feeling is different, you lose the feeling of security when you cant protect your child. He

This is a poem written on December 31st, 1899. Hardy wrote it at the end of a century. During the time that this poem was written there was a lot of violence such as the boxer rebellion, Philippine - American war and the second Boer war, it is important to have a bit of context for the poem to understand where all the hopelessness is coming from.

“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell is able to accomplish so many thing with so little lines-mainly through the use of metaphor and diction. It explains the terrors of wars in gruesome detail and explains the ways in which wars, in a sense “breed” and “birth” death. To some, this poem is seen as the ultimate poem of war, and rightly

In the first part of the poem the writer shows the difficulty he is having with taking a human life. In the second stanza he says “Making night work for us the starlight scope bringing men into killing range. This dark tone helps to emphasize the struggle the author is feeling as a soldier in war. Also he shows his emotions directly. In stanza 3 he says “The river under Vi Bridge takes the heart away”. This quote shows the feeling that the author gets

Since the beginning of time, humans have sought after power and control. It is human instinct to desire to be the undisputed champion, but when does it become a problem? Warfare has been practiced throughout civilization as a way to justify power. Though the orders come directly from one man, thousands of men and women pay the ultimate sacrifice. In Randall Jerrell’s “The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner”, Jarrell is commenting on the brutality of warfare. Not only does Jarrell address the tragedies of war, he also blames politics, war leaders, and the soldier’s acknowledgement of his duties. (Hill 6) With only five lines of text, his poems allows the reader to understand what a soldier can go through. With the use of Jerrell’s poem, The Vietnam War, and Brian Turner’s “Ameriki Jundee”, the truth of combat will be revealed.

The first stanza tells the reader that the writer glorified war and hoped to be a solider. In the second stanza, the battles that he speaks of aren’t real, they’re battles that he has imagined. The battles and innumerable wounds could be metaphors for his hard upbringing (3-4). The poem uses a lot of figurative language to portray the authors youthful imagination. Simic imagines what it would be like to be a solider, by playing with cardboard swords and boasting about “Slain thousands” (4).

The third stanza is addressed to ‘good men’ who regret their choices in life and think of how much they could have achieved, if they had only had lived longer. Poetic techniques used in this stanza are personification, symbolism, repetition and rhyme. In the second line, we see the use of personification when Thomas writes of how “their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay”, referring to the ‘good men’. This line paints a picture of how the frail

How would it feel to go out to fight an evil monster, only to find out that it’s a regular person just like you? In the poem “The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy, a soldier talks about how he might have been friends with an enemy soldier he killed, if not for the war. This poem demonstrates the theme that war makes enemies out of people who are quite similar. During World War 1, propaganda made it show enemies of other countries to look inhumane, or like animals. This made it so people who joined the military thought that the people they were fighting weren’t human, when in reality, they were just as human, and probably shared many of the same ideas or qualities.

The poem “The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy is symbolic of the subtle conflicted effects brought about as a result of war. And the speaker in the poem is a classic example of someone who is trying to cope with conflicting memories of “what if?” What if he had not gone to war and killed a man? What if he had met the man under different circumstances? “Had he and I but met/ By some old ancient inn/we should have sat us down to wet (lines 1-3).

This essay will be discussing and exploring how attitudes to war in the Shakespeare play, Henry V, and a selection of war poetry are presented and developed. The three choices of poems that will be explored are ‘For the fallen’ by Robert Lawrence Binyon, ‘The soldier’ by Rupert Brooke and ‘MCMXIV’ by Philip Larkin. All poems have links and contrasts to the Shakespeare play which present many attitudes to war which develop throughout. Henry V and the poems, ‘For the fallen’ and ‘MCMXIV’ include a subtle cryptogram apart from ‘The soldier’. Rupert Brooke used a title that was easy to read by everyone.

"The Man He Killed" is not like any other war poem. It is very brief and personal about a speaker telling a story on behalf of a soilder who shot another man down for reasons he cannot figure out. He tries to justify this in the poem but the language shows that he can't find any legitamate reasoning behind it. But at the end of the poem he realizes the other man was trying to kill him as well. Hardy revealed his opinion on the war through his poetry. He used a story of a single soilder to confront why war is seemingly pointless. How these two men who can be so similar end up at the same place on opposing

The combination of how the subject matter is conveyed by the narrator, and the emotions which are built through poetic devices contribute to constructing the message the author intended for each poem. Throughout Drummer Hodge, Hardy appears to express the idea that dying in battle is no way to achieve immortality through the memory of others, as every death is unnecessary and soon forgotten to the land. He frequently infers that Hodge is consumed by the landscape, becoming a part of it as he slowly loses everything he was. Hardy reinforces this idea that a soldiers death is meaningless and not at all remembered, by cleverly turning the phrase, ‘being laid to rest,’ which indicates the care and effort put into burring the deceased, into one which demonstrates the meaninglessness of his death. This can be seen in the first line of the poem, “They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest,” where he is not laid to rest, but thrown illustrating the fact that the soldier is totally disregarded and not remembered in any significant way. Brooke however, constructs a romanticized message of remembrance and honour for the soldier. The Soldier seems to convey the message that death in battle is an honourable death, which serves to repay a man’s homeland for all it has given him, an action for which, he will be remembered. He continually refers to the transformation which occurs upon a soldier’s death, entailing the change of the very soil he falls on, to English soil. This implication