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AQA Power and

Conflict

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Critical Anthology for High
Achievers

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CONTENTS

1. Ozymandias p.3-6
2.London p.7
3. Extract from the Prelude p.8-9
4.My Last Duchess
5. Charge of the Light Brigade
6. Exposure
7. Storm on the Island
8. Bayonet Charge
9. Remains
10. Poppies
11. War Photographer
12. Tissue
13. The Emigree
14. Checking out me History
15. Kamikaze

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OZYMANDIAS
"In the poem, the narrator relates what someone else described to him about pieces of a
broken statue lying in a desert. Once a great symbol of power and strength, the statue has
become a metaphor for the ultimate powerlessness of man. Time and the elements have
reduced the great statue to a pile of rubble. Shelley usually wrote about Romantic subjects
such as love, nature, heightened emotion and hope, but Shelley was also a political writer
and "Ozymandias" provides insight into the poet’s views on power, fame and political legacy.
Ultimately, the poem shows that political leadership is fleeting and forgotten, no matter how
hard a ruler may try to preserve his own greatness" – David Wheeler

A literary analysis of Ozymandias


The central thematic concerns of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry illustrate the influence of
Romanticism on literature through the poem’s imagery, word choice and irony. Ozymandias
demonstrates the characteristics of a sublime Romantic poem such as beauty, passions,
nature, political liberty, creativity and the sanctity of the imagination.1
The poem tells the partial story of a once mighty king whose works are now in waste. The
poet paints a picture of a once powerful king whose kingdom no longer exists. The first 11
lines are one sentence talking about a harsh, demanding, egotistical ruler who culminates in
his own arrogant words, so is about pride.2 Also, Davon Ferrara claims that "Shelley makes
use of contrasting imagery in line 2. The legs being "vast and trunckless" are two contrasting
images. The statue that was there was a huge, important man no longer stands except for
two legs. The legs are in a desert, giving an image of a vast, barren land with just the
remains of this statue." In the poem Ozymandias, Shelley creates the image of a wrecked
sculpture to show that nature destroys all. The irony of a king’s broken statue exhibit
nature’s superiority over arrogant mankind.3

1
Reiman, Donald H. and Sharon B. Powers. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose . Norton, 1977
2
Morton, Timothy. The Cambridge Companion to Shelley. Cambridge University Press, 2006
3
Macovski, Michael. Dialogue and Critical Discourse : Language, Culture, Critical Theory. Oxford University
Press, 1998

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As Davon Ferrara points out, "Another contrast is set up between "shattered and visage"
as one describes something in pieces, while that something was once the head of a statue.
The word visage gives an elegant connotation to the image". Kimberly Renee comments that
"It alludes to more than a simple break in the statue, shatter implies complete destruction.
Shelley thus points out human mortality and the fate of artificial things. He also uses the
desert’s destruction of manmade glory to show the Romantic idea that nature overpowers
man. His face is one of power, yet it is not described as a beautiful face. There is a "wrinkled
lip and sneer of cold command" in line 5. These words illustrate that Ozymandias had a look
of distaste and scorn on his face. This description also alludes to his pride and arrogance".
However, Davon Ferrara concedes that " On line 6, this expression is described as one of
passion, giving us another contrast and irony. Passions are usually thought of as warm not
as a cold sneer. Yet, only this passion survived through time as a picture of the fallen king.
This brings us to another contrast between "survive" and "lifeless". Survival means to live
on, but the only part of Ozymandias that lives on is his sneering statue. "The hand that
mocked them and the heart that fed" is still another contrast of the king. It is hard to
imagine the king being described as a "heart that fed" when all that we see is a cold sneer,
that is almost mocking. After this, the traveller zooms back out a bit, showing us the words
on the statue’s pedestal. The inscription has an ironic meaning to it. When King Ozymandias
wrote the inscription, he meant to fear him because of all his "mighty works", but time, the
true King of Kings, has brought a different meaning to the inscription. The Mighty should not
fear Ozymandias but they should fear the effects of time, as they can see from the bare
remains surrounding the statue. Just as Ozymandias’ works were forgotten with time,
everyone else shall face the same fate, no matter what their might. It is also ironic because
the king boasts of his great power and the impressiveness of his works." Kimberly Renee
also points out that "This contradicts with the scene that is given. All of the mighty works
that he boasts of are gone. In reality all that remains of the great ruler is a decrepit statue.
All traces of his great power have crumbled into dust."
In the words of Davon Ferrara, "The traveller says that nothing remains but the crumbling
statue, and that "Round the decay/Of that colossal Wreck" nothing remains but sand in lines
12-14. The "Nothing beside" the ruins, emphasizes desolation and disconnects them not
only in space, but in time, from the busy and important context they once existed. The
contrasting image of a "colossal Wreck" serves the purpose of comparing what was before
and what remains. The word "boundless" describes the sand surrounding the statue, but
also, it describes time. Ozymandias’ kingdom had a limit on it and after it was all said and
done, his kingdom now consists of a single, decaying statue, lone on the sand, while time’s
kingdom is boundless. The limit on Ozymandias’ kingdom and the boundlessness of time is
the most significant contrast in the poem, for it contains the theme of the poem. The "lone
and level sands" suggests the desolation, the results from humans imposing themselves on
the land."
The poem uses many words and phrases that allude to Ozymandias’ greater than life
persona. However, these descriptions do not comply with the scene of destruction. The
irony of the situation relates to the theme of the poem. Ozymandias believed that his

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kingdom would remain forever. However, all the material possession in the world was not
enough to sustain his power. In the end his words take on a meaning different from what he
intended, he finally realizes that despite all the power and might one acquires in the course
of life, material possessions will not last forever. And generally nothing lasts forever",
asserts Kimberly Renee. Through the use of metaphor of rise, peak and fall of Ozymandias,
Shelley condenses all of civilization history. He shows that all the works of human kind,
including social structures, will eventually become history.4

Important themes and symbols


The first theme that Shelley discusses is the power of both seen and unseen nature
throughout his entire poem. For this reason the poem is classified as a Romantic poem.
Shelley in Ozymandias shows both the positive and the negative aspect of nature.
Specifically, he accepts that nature is a source of inspiration and creation, such as the
creation of the huge statue that once was an important person but he also recognizes that
nature is not only positive describing the remains of the statue in the desert. Nature inspires
and creates as frequently as it destroys. However, the remains of a king’s broken statue
indicate nature’s superiority over human kind’s arrogance.5
Ozymandias is a political poem about the illusion of fame and power. In the poem,
Ozymandias was so proud of his own power and so bent on asserting it that he
commissioned a great sculpture of himself glorifying his own authority. The way he chose to
be depicted in the sculpture has all the hallmarks of strong rulership. The face is stern and
resolute, appearing to be unswayed by anyone with less power than he. The hand keeps his
people humble, yet Ozymandias is also the one who ensures that his people are fed. His
power is such that his people seemingly would not be able to provide for their own needs
without him. In all, the figure of Ozymandias is a commanding and powerful one. The
depiction of power is only part of Shelley’s intent in the poem and not even the most
important part. If there is one element of social theory to take from Shelley’s poetry, it
should be his determination to inspire the oppressed classes to engage in revolution against
the tyranny of wicked institutions, such as the royal court, legal courts and other
government systems and churches. The upheaval in France during his lifetime, with the
motions of the French Revolution fresh in the minds of many in Europe, was a strong
influence on him.6
According to David Wheeler, "Akin to the theme of power is the theme of pride.
Ozymandias was clearly a proud ruler who seems to have been as determined to hold onto
power as he was to proclaim it to all generations. There were numerous rulers throughout
history who possessed strength, stability, wisdom and the respect of their people and other
nations and some of them felt compelled to glorify themselves in art and architecture, as
did Ozymandias. While it is possible that the statue described in the poem could have been
commissioned by someone other than the king, the traveller indicates that the sculptor

4
Morton, Timothy. The Cambridge Companion to Shelley. Cambridge University Press, 2006
5
Reiman, Donald H. and Sharon B. Powers. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose . Norton, 1977
6
Morton, Timothy. The Cambridge Companion to Shelley. Cambridge University Press, 2006

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knew his subject well. The sculptor was clearly close to Ozymandias, given access to his
motives and leadership style in a way that enabled him to carve a realistic face and to
understand the symbolism of the king’s hand and heart. These clues lead to the conclusion
that Ozymandias oversaw the sculpture or at the very least, the artist was caught up in the
king’s pride. Either way, Ozymandias’ pride is clearly reflected in the statue."
Ozymandias’ pride is also evident in the inscription on the pedestal. This assertive
statement is swollen with pride. He calls himself "king of kings", indicating that he sees
himself as the greatest of all kings while also implying that his "works" like the statue, the
pyramids are the best of all. Ozymandias thinks pretty highly of himself and of what he has
achieved, both politically and artistically. Then he tells the viewer to observe all he has done
and realize that there is no comparison. The fact that he commissions this colossal statue
with vast legs points to his sense of pride, while the statue’s fragmentary state indicates the
emptiness of Ozymandias’ boast7.
The only symbol that exists in Shelley’s work is the statue of Ozymandias, which
symbolizes political tyranny. The statue is broken into pieces in the desert, which means
that oppression is temporary and that an unjust ruler does not have power which lasts
forever. The broken statue also symbolizes the era of civilization and culture. The statue is a
construction made by a creator and now it and its creator have been destroyed, likewise all
living things which are finally destroyed.8

7
Callaghan, Madeleine. The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Oxford University Press, 2013
8
Reiman, Donald H. and Sharon B. Powers. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose . Norton, 1977

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LONDON
“London” is a poem in which Blake criticises the contemporary society which has become
the symbol of oppression. The so-called liberty of which his countrymen are proud is
nothing but “a chartered liberty” the natural and free growth of man is impossible. The evils
of the then society have been exemplified by the chimney sweeper’s miserable life, helpless
deaths of the soldiers and the exploitation of the harlots. Thus, the child chimney sweeper,
the soldier, and the harlot are Blake’s types of the oppressed- characteristic victims of a
system based not on brotherhood but on fear. In the poem “London”, Blake attacks the
hollowness of the society and the helplessness of the church.

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The poem presents a real picture of the society of London. The river Thames flows quietly by
the side of London bearing witness to all the ugly and crushing scenes of London. He finds in
the cries of children and men the replica of men’s own sinful deeds. The poet hears the cries
of the chimney-sweepers which appal the helpless church. The sight of the dying soldier
whose blood drops down the palace walls is audible to the poet. At midnight the curses of
the young harlots are heard in the streets. This unnatural life spoils the holy tie between the
wife and husband in their marital life. It is the result of the marriage devoid of love and so a
man seeks a harlot to satisfy his passion. Besides, the children, born out of the loveless
marriage and out of adultery pose a great problem to the society.

The target of the attack is the church, society, and man. In “London” we can find a
progression in terms of both feelings and thoughts. The boy, who was born into a dangerous
society, now has to face the problems of existence. The poet notices woe and weariness in
the faces of the Londoners instead of joy and pleasure. Blake has given a picture of the
society with sketches of three corrupt practices as embodied in the chimney sweeper, the
harlot, and the soldiers.

The phrase “mind-forg’d manacles” is important to understand the theme of the poem. The
people are in chains everywhere. Every face in the city is melancholy because of his misery
caused by man, all the so-called industrial progress has brought about misery for most of
them. This poem is the criticism of the society and the whole trend of the contemporary
society. It is a protest against the exploitation of the poor by the rich.

It is a short poem of four-lined four stanzas but is full of ideas within a short poem; he has
put a universal problem the solution of which lies in universal love for all.

EXTRACT FROM ‘THE


PRELUDE’
In this poem extract of The Prelude, Wordsworth presents two contrasting
ideas about nature, and allows the reader to decide what nature means to him

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or herself personally. The context of this extract from The Prelude also provides
insight into the speaker and the author. Wordsworth’s prelude explores his
childhood thoughts and the ways in which he has changed and grown over
time. This portion begins with the speaker as a boy and explores his feelings of
peace with nature. Then, an event occurs which changes the speaker’s feelings
toward the world. This represents the boy coming to an age of understanding
the dangers of the world.

“It is not my intention to suggest that Wordsworth was a ‘nature lover’ in its
most literal sense, nor to suggest that he saw himself in anyway engaging
sexually with nature. The explication in this way, rather, is to deepen the
sincere intimacy with which Wordsworth felt in nature and suggest that it
might have been unconscious of him to invoke these clearly sexual allusions;
yet because it is hard to see Wordsworth unconscious of anything he wrote,
this seems doubtful. These sentiments are meant to express a means of
explicating that connection to nature that Wordsworth felt so strongly, not to
suggest vulgarity of any kind. Ultimately, whether or not these two discursions
are fair or not will be up to the reader. However, in exploring them we may see
further examples of thought and sound coming together to produce powerful,
interpretive messages regarding the role nature played, whether majestic or
intimate, in the development of Wordsworth’s mind as a poet.”

Watkins' reading of the "stolen boat" episode in The Prelude demonstrates far
more convincingly the intricate links between Wordsworth's vision of the
formation of an autonomous, subjective identity and the larger cultural shift in
economic relations. In short, Watkins understands this episode as primarily
masturbatory in nature, and, accordingly, he reads the poet's rowing of the
boat and the rise of the mountain before him as auto-erotic in its symbolism.
And where masturbation functions in the interest of selfish pleasure, so, too,
Watkins argues, does the emergence of individual understanding as it is
depicted in The Prelude: for Watkins, the stolen boat—the object crucial to
ego-formation and the development of individual subjectivity—represents
property-to-be-overtaken, which represents woman as she is appropriated by
man, which represents bourgeois social and psychological terrain, which
manifests capitalism at the register of interpersonal relations (51).
Wordsworth's focus on the particular nature of the boat—its stolen-ness, we
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might say—further emphasizes the poet's understanding, appreciation, and
value of individual property as identity: in stealing the boat Wordsworth claims
some sort of power or control through that property itself and in returning the
boat after suffering from guilt over this transgression of property, Wordsworth
solidifies his own complicity in such an economic system, the return of the
boat signaling Wordsworth's tacit acceptance of and respect for the property—
the masculinity—of another (55). In a powerful assertion, Watkins subsumes
guilt within the larger framework of sadeian logic by arguing that the psychic
phenomenon "humanizes and personalizes the sadistic actions that have
transpired, cleansing them of their violent horror and civilizing them without
changing them; in this way, guilt assures that sexual violence and imperialist
conquest are sanctified"

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MY LAST DUCHESS
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CHARGE OF THE LIGHT
BRIGADE
As with much war poetry – and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ is, after all, a
war poem – Tennyson uses biblical allusions to bring home the grand sacrifice
made by the soldiers: ‘the valley of death’ is from the 23rd Psalm (that’s the
one that begins ‘The Lord is my shepherd…’): ‘Yea, though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod
and thy staff they comfort me.’ As well as contributing to the sonorous note of
the poem, this allusion also offers comfort: men may make blunders, but the
Lord will see that good overcomes evil. Many of Tennyson’s Victorian readers
would have found such a message comforting, despite some of them – and
Tennyson himself – harbouring doubts over the literal truth of Christianity.

The famous line of the poem, ‘Their’s but to do and die’, is often misquoted as
‘Their’s but to do ordie’, which gives the poem a different inflection. But
Tennyson’s point is that there is no question of whether the soldiers will fail to
carry out their military duty, even when presented with such a wrongheaded
command to charge. They will do it and die, for queen and country. Another
line that is often misremembered is ‘Cannon to right of them’, which is
sometimes erroneously rendered as ‘Cannon to the right of them’, which
disrupts the rigid rhythm of the line (the poem is written largely in dactylic
metre): the omission of ‘the’ makes the line sound slightly curtailed and
hurried, evoking the rashness of the charge itself. The absence of ‘the’ from
the line also makes it sound a little odd or unnatural, once again suggesting
that there is something wrong here. Why are these men, members of
this light brigade, being ordered to charge into the heavy cannon-fire of the
enemy?

After the charge, not much remains of the ‘six hundred’ who rode into battle –
nearly half of them had sustained heavy injuries or been killed, while the other
half felt that the whole charge had been a colossal waste of life. Tennyson’s
use of the word ‘left’ (‘All that was left of them, / Left of six hundred’) picks up
on the word’s use earlier in the same stanza (‘Cannon to left of them’), but
shifts the word’s meaning from a spatial sense to one denoting the sacrifice

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the men have made. As the old line attributed to Bertrand Russell has it, war
doesn’t determine who is right – only who is left.

EXPOSURE
'Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry', wrote Yeats, attempting to justify his
distaste for Owen. 'Exposure' gives a worm's-eye view of the front line, based on
Owen's experiences in the winter of 1917, and passive suffering is what it is all
about. 'Nothing happens', as he says four times - nothing except tiny changes in the
time of day, the weather and the progress of the war. The men appear trapped in a
No Man's Land between life and death, and the poem's movement is circular. When
it ends, they are exactly where they were in the first verse.
'What are we doing here?' the poet asks in verse 2. The real cause of their suffering
is that they are lying in the open under freezing conditions, with some psychological
force forbidding them to get up and walk away. The parallel is with hanging on a
cross, and verse 7 examines the possibility that they are suffering for others.
Two literary influences are present. 'Our brains ache' echoes 'My heart aches', the
first words of 'Ode to a Nightingale', by Owen's beloved Keats. But he was aware
that his generation was living through horrors which the Romantics had not dreamed
of, and that in order to describe them, poetry had to change. He also has in mind Ivor
Novello's song, 'Keep the home fires burning .... though your lads are far away they
dream of home'. But in his dream of home, the fires are almost dead. 'Crusted dark-
red jewels' is an example of the care Owen takes with small phrases; the fires are
beautiful but, like jewels, offer no warmth or comfort. The house has been deserted
by its human inhabitants and verse 6 suggests that if the young men went home they
would not be welcomed. 'Shutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed',
the poem laments, with the emphasis on us. They are compelled and expected to
stay where they are.
Verse 7 appears to suggest that the men are Christ-figures, dying willingly - 'not
loath' - for the sake of others, but Owen is not prepared to state this categorically and
the words 'we believe' must be heavily stressed. 'Love of God seems dying'; the
simple Christianity which he had once believed seems inappropriate. The last verse
suggests that one more night in the open will finish them off.
The final version of this poem belongs to September 1918, a few weeks before
Owen was killed, and it is mature and brilliant work. There are some daring half-
rhymes - 'knive us/nervous', 'nonchalance/happens' - which come off, as does the
short, simple, hanging line at the end of each verse.

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STORM ON THE ISLAND
Storm On The Island is a poem that gives voice to a people who live in constant
fear of the power of natural storms.
Life on an island may from a distance seem idyllic and peaceful but this poem
views that life from a totally different perspective: one of survival. This is
reflected in the emphatic first three words, which form a slogan...We are
prepared...
The remainder of the first line is an iambic reinforcement of domestic
certainty: the houses are built squat, to withstand any storm. This line sets a
firm foundation for the rest of the poem - here is a determined people who
know just what they have to do.
The following four lines are all about preparedness and the bareness of that
island environment. A defiant tone is set right from the off, tempered
somewhat by casual asides (as you see....you know what I mean) - it's as if the
speaker is right next to the reader, explaining away the reasons for
preparedness, focusing on the local needs.
This is Heaney's genius at work, taking the reader by the hand, guiding them
into the poem's natural heart, which is usually earthy, sometimes dark, always
enlightening.
By using repetition of certain key words and phrases, for
example company and fear and never troubled us/a tragic chorus and we just
sit tight/spits like a tame cat, a certain tension is set up between an almost
relaxed attitude to the natural surroundings and the storm itself.
The islanders don't grow cereal crops, there are no trees. The former cannot
therefore be lost, which a bonus when the storm winds are blowing, the latter
might be missed because they could conceivably be said to be company, a
distraction from having your house battered.
 The enjambment here, from lines 3 - 9 works especially well because the
reader is encouraged to move on and build up the sense, just as the storm
gathers its energy before lashing out and expending.
 Note the assonance too, vowels sounding similar in close
words: raise/gale...listen/thing....sea/company.

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Because of this lack of natural shelter the storm is felt all the more as a threat.
The sea (again likened to company, like the trees) may appear friendly but is
not. Like a bomb it hits the cliffs then turns inland and becomes savage.
In the meantime the wind takes on the character of an invading aeroplane - it
dives and strafes - the only difference being that you cannot see the wind.
Towards the end of the poem the speaker's tone becomes philosophical, which
is a puzzle - perhaps having spent so long on the island and become so used to
storms, the speaker has developed an alternative take on their nature.
The wind is present invisibly, space is a salvo (a series of aggressive acts), they
are bombarded with the empty air and fear a huge nothing.
All of this leaves the reader with an image of the speaker, or indeed the
speaker together with the whole of the island population, inside their squat
houses sitting out the storm. There they are surviving the violence of nature,
safe between their walls whilst outside mayhem rules.
That last line seems to be the thought of someone who has seen it all and is
now puzzling over the substance of the storm. Just what is a storm? Basically it
is very strong and forceful winds which no one can see - only when it comes
against material objects, things, do we know it is there.

Storm On The Island is a poem that can be taken literally, as a


dramatic monologue on the life and attitude of island people
facing a storm, or it can be understood as an extended
metaphor of political struggle on the island of Ireland.
Whether these forces are natural or political the phrase
'collective responsibility' comes to mind - the people have to get
their act together or else they will not survive.
Seamus Heaney knew both worlds intimately although he
chose through his poetry not to become a political voice
outright, but to concentrate his energies on the rural scenes he
grew up in - farming, family and history being his primary focus.
His early poems are earthy and grounded in the soil of County
Derry so it's logical to assume that Storm On The Island is
about just that: islanders coming together to withstand a natural
battering - an ongoing conflict between humans and nature.

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 From the first line of the poem it is clear that the speaker
represents a people, a specific family, an island folk. In this
sense the voice is that of a spokesperson addressing
someone who does not quite understand their
predicament....We are prepared: we build our houses squat,
 The tone is defiant and yet conversational, it's as if the
speaker is having to explain to outsiders just why things are
as they are, as they need to be.
 Heaney uses a basic pentameter template, 10 and 11
syllable lines, with varying feet - trochaic and spondaic and
so on, to break up iambic rhythm and create tension. A
more detailed analysis of metre can be found below.
 The form is solid, a single 19 line stanza, reflecting the
island and the strong architecture.
 The language is sometimes brutal and military
- Blast...pummels...Exploding...flung...spits...dives and
strafes...bombarded.
The poem was published in 1966 in his first book The Death of
A Naturalist

BAYONET CHARGE
Suddenly he awoke and was running – raw He awakes from
some automatous dreamlike state to the physical reality of repeated, chaffing rawness
and breathlessness in the alliterated ‘r’ ‘h’ and ‘s’ sounds

In raw-seamed hot khaki, his sweat heavy,

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stumbling across a field of clods towards a green hedge Note the absurdity of
running towards some anonymous, random hedge as well as the physical effort
conveyed when going across the ‘k’ in the physical field of ‘clods’

That dazzled with rifle fire, hearing The synaesthesia of ‘dazzled’ conveys a
disorientating visual effect of rifle fire on the infantryman.

Bullets smacking the belly out of the air – onomatopoeia used to alarming effect. The
air is personified, losing its breath to violent assault.

He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm; he is heaving this weight and he remains
devoid of all feeling – yet the rifle is a part of him. The simile draws out a sense of
utter, dragging disabiity and futility.

The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye Patriotism, as it was in the past: that
sentimentalised tearful false emotion of loyalty has now transformed into a genuine
furnace-hot internal personal lava-sweat of feeling.

Sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest, –

In bewilderment then he almost stopped –

In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations hard alliterated sound provides a
sense of an uncaring mechanical universe and the inevitability geo-political self-
interest.

Was he the hand pointing that second? He was running The question remains
unanswered: of what sort of unfeeling world was he such an integral part that he
should be the stillness of the actual moment? After the caesura, the line continues
with a nightmarish image of running in darkness with tripled repetition of ‘runs’ and
‘running’, with no reason coming forth out of the emptiness.

Like a man who has jumped up in the dark and runs This simile here has another
simile (‘like statuary’) within it, giving the moment an unreality divorced from time
and place.

Listening between his footfalls for the reason

Of his still running, and his foot hung like the moment held immobile ….

Statuary in mid-stride. Then the shot-slashed furrows … before the alliterated violent
action of bullets

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Threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flame A shocking image of the hare’s dying
moments and death: the assonance of ‘rolled’ and ‘crawled’ coalesces the
hare’s suffering.

And crawled in a threshing circle, its mouth wide the nominalised noun phrase ‘a
threshing circle’ provides a shocking image of dying. (This comes about from the
nominalisation of the verb ‘to thresh’ which is combined with the noun ‘circle’ into a
noun phrase with a single, dynamically powerful unit of meaning.)

Open silent, its eyes standing out.

He plunged past with his bayonet toward the green hedge, The absurdity lies in the
alliterated desperation of plunging ‘past’ the hare’s excruciating death throes, with
only a bayonet, to head towards some anonymous and, otherwise, anodyne ‘green
hedge’, which is referenced for a second time in the poem.

King, honour, human dignity, etcetera the ‘et cetera’ reveals a dismissive tone
towards the tripled values which were traipsed out to promote a fighting spirit in the
men.

Dropped like luxuries in a yelling alarm Such nationalistic ideals are ‘dropped like
luxuries’; the simile highlighting the superfluity and artificial fabrication of these
concepts when presented against the terror of the next lines.

To get out of that blue crackling air The synaesthesia of colour and sound confounds
our senses.

His terror’s touchy dynamite. The alliteration is a dangerous prelude to the explosive
nature of his fear

REMAINS
Finding words for hidden wounds
Published: 14:25Wednesday 07 November 2007Updated: 17:11Friday 09 November 2007

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A MAN with imagination is blessed. If he's a soldier, it may be a curse. Michael Hickling talks
to Huddersfield poet Simon Armitage about war stories on this Remembrance weekend
Three men, whose soldiering spans more than 60 years, look individually into the camera and
talk about being at war with themselves.

A common thread binds them. All were patriotic, trained and ready to go into the firing line
and they did their duty. What they were not ready for was the shock of adapting to normal life
when they went home.

One of them, Cliff Holland, a bricklayer before he went to fight Communist terrorists in
Malaya in 1950 and who is now in his seventies, indicates with grim humour the unreal
feeling of coming out of the ranks and colliding with the world of civvy street.

"You couldn't go into the Labour Exchange and say, 'If you know anyone wants killing, I'm
your man'."

When Cliff left the Army, he returned to his former trade, found a wife and then got back into
uniform as a policeman. From the outside, it looked a normal process, a period of adjustment
safely negotiated. But the truth was that Cliff's Malaya experiences would not go away. And
rather than dimming with age, his regular nightmares, re-visiting scenes of sudden death and
carnage, have become more vivid and insistent.

Two other much younger men take part in this programme. They soldiered in different wars
but are now engaged in the same long campaign as Cliff against an enemy within.

Rob Tromans was a guardsman who saw fighting in Iraq in 2003 as a machine-gunner in a
Warrior armoured vehicle. Eddie Beddoes was a teenage fusilier in Bosnia attached to the
United Nations peace-keeping force, who was shot in the neck, seriously wounded and
disfigured.

What makes their television performances so compelling is the role played by someone who is
not seen on screen. Huddersfield poet Simon Armitage listened to the men's unedited accounts
and extracted from them particular modes of expression and turns of phrase which he re-
fashioned as poems. The former soldiers speak these to the camera with such fluency and
conviction, they appear spontaneous, their own words. Laura, wife of Eddie, also takes part
and she has her own poem, possibly the most moving of all, which describes in tender words
the powerful physical attraction of her husband's presence despite his injury. Cliff's poem goes
with a narrative swing which maybe carries an echo of Rudyard Kipling. His war, the Malayan
Emergency, which lasted from 1948 to 1960, was an end-of-Empire affair.

Simon Armitage was commissioned to make the film for Channel 4 and it's the latest of his
collaborations with the director Brian Hill. Initially, an organisation called Combat Stress was
approached who helped line up seven or eight traumatised ex-soldiers, eventually whittled
down to three.

"I didn't interview them, I kept out of that side," says Simon Armitage. "I used to be a
probation officer, so I understand the need to be dispassionate in these circumstances.

22
"It's always been the intention of the film that you are not sure what you are watching – is it a
documentary or a drama? It's kind of a weird vehicle, a documentary with writing in it. I'm not
sure what category you'd give it. It seems odd, I sit here 200 miles away from where the film
is being put together. The poetry all comes out of the testimony and statements of the people
in the film.

I expanded the language, the phrases and the issues, then gave it them back – so they could see
if we've properly represented them in the poem. I didn't want to be putting words into their
mouths. I looked at three to four hours of material and I've given them all copies of the poems,
printed and signed. You want them relaxed in a confident way on television, like it's their
words they're speaking and sometimes that's hard work. Making it happen can be a matter of
changing the camera angle, or putting the script away. You sit next to them and give it a go.
Some people have never read a poem in their life."Does Cliff sound Kiplingesque? They are
his own phrases which I heard in the interviews. He's very nostalgic, quite lyrical, knows a
good refrain. In the poems I try to say difficult things in a concentrated manner. There was a
lot to toing and froing. Cliff was happy with it as it came. Images of grief and guilt get
stronger over the years, old soldiers can be lachrymose and weepy as they get older, 50 years
after events happened.

"Eddie wanted to correct things factually and he was very tenacious. He even tracked me
down to Canada to get in touch and make it plain there were things he didn't want.

"Eddie was a fascinating character, very articulate, highly involved in the film. I began to
wonder whether, on the whole, if that was the reason why all three of them had suffered –
because they were more imaginative than their colleagues. That's just speculation."

Rob is a fervent patriot and West Bromwich Albion supporter and some of the filming of his
story takes place at his team's Hawthorns ground. "I think they wanted him in the empty
stadium to be filmed jumping up and shouting 'Albion!' – to make the connection with Albion
as England. But he didn't want to do that.

"Rob was tricky. He had issues about what he would read and he's got a strong Black Country
accent – to my ear anyway. There's no reason why you can't read a poem in any accent, but
there's a sense in which his everyday speech made him the least poetic of the characters. That
took a lot of thinking about. Out of everyone Rob was the most cautious, he was worried he
might be embarrassed and exposed in public to his friends. On screen he looks almost
furtively, questioningly at the camera.

"It was important to have the female voice in the film. Laura was nervous and giddy at first
because there's a sensual aspect to that poem. When written for radio and TV, poems are
different, the priority is the broadcast material, you hear it once and it's gone. You can't be too
complex.

"We don't have a statement in mind in making this film. I'm against the war in Iraq, but that's
not what it's about. It's about the fact that no-one deserves to be treated like this. These men
have done extraordinary things and it should be acknowledged. They've been involved in a
war and when they come back they feel as if everyone is against them, almost pariahs. If they
are feeling vulnerable, that's not going to help.

23
"They were all prepared, ready and willing for war. But they were not ready to come back,
they didn't

get help. Most occupations look after their own,

they get professional help. These men didn't feel

they'd had that. They felt their employers were suspicious and embarrassed and preferred to
push them to one side.

"All suffered from post traumatic stress disorder, it came over strongly that they had been
neglected. It's common among younger soldiers that they go into a tailspin – drink, drugs,
homelessness, continual court appearances – a complete contrast to the normal.

"Unlike most psychological analysis – which stresses the need for a traumatised individual to
move on – these veterans are told they've got to learn to live with it. That advice seems
specific to this condition, post traumatic stress disorder.

"There's a strong connection between war and poetry in English literature. Wilfred Owen,
Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney are among the most important poets in the English language.
When poems are working at their most powerfully, they are about ultimate human experiences
– and these men were operating at the limit of human experience. They sent back serious
literary reports about what was really going on at the front.

"They were writing in a time of conscription, when so many men were sent to slaughter and
went whistling on their way to die. The poets of the Great War set the benchmark so high.
Poetry had never really been used in the Western literary tradition to show the disgust and
disgrace of war, not dignified and heroic.

"There is a huge body of work from poets who fought in the Second World War, but it's not as
detailed, not as focused. Some of the best poems are by people who didn't fight, like Auden.

"My own time has been shot through with conflict – the Falklands, Bosnia, the Gulf – and I've
written about all of them. This film is the closest I'll come to the genuine article. If you're a
poet today, you won't volunteer to fight in a war.

"I don't know any poet who'd join up today. A poet is a specialist, it's unlikely he'd want to be,
let's say, a specialist marine. Brian Turner, an American, is the exception. He writes very good
literary poetry, the proper stuff. I've never been asked to write from the front line. If the
opportunity came up, in the light of this film, I probably would do, although I'd be s**t-scared.

"I teach at Manchester Metropolitan University and many of the students weren't even born by
the time of the Falklands war. You might as well be talking about the siege of Troy to them."

24
POPPIES
25
An analysis of the context, form and
structure of Poppies by Jane Weir
Posted on April 30, 2017

This poem looks at a female perspective on conflict, and as such, it offers us our first female
voice in the ‘Power and Conflict’ section of AQA’s GCSE English Literature poetry
anthology. We see conflict from a mother’s perspective, a position that is both objective, looking
on, and subjectively involved. The poet takes on the persona of a mother -it is not important
whether she’s writing in character, or writing about her own experiences. It seems ostensibly
about a child leaving for school, not a soldier leaving to fight, with the “yellow bias” on the
“blazer” which gives it more in common with Cecil Day Lewis’s poem Walking Away in the
‘Love and Relationships’ section of the anthology. She says she deliberately left out any specific
war: “after all, there are lots of wars”, which makes it relevant to whichever war – all wars – and
she says she was deliberately thinking about mothers, including Susan Owen, Wilfred Owen’s
mother. It shows you don’t have to be directly involved in conflict for it to affect you.
So, when considering the form… When I think about the form of the poem, I think about the
following:

Form
How it’s set out on the page; line length, syllables, rhythm (metre) rhyme, what words are on
what line, number of lines, sonnet, couplets, three lines, quatrains, regularity of the number of
lines in a verse/stanza, capitals (or lack of) main punctuation at the end of lines or stanzas (, . , . /
, , , . / ; : ; . ) phrase splits and the way the words fall on each line, which ideas are linked within
the line or stanza and which are separate, caesura, enjambment.

Form is what makes it a poem and not prose. Why does it look the way it does? What decisions
has the poet made about what he has put on one line and what on another? Why this form?

So, Poppies… what do we notice this form? What effects might it have on the reader?
The poem is written in a very natural way. It’s almost like the line breaks are artificial and just
there to make it look like a poem. If you remove the line breaks, it’s very hard to know where
they would go, and it works well as a piece of prose. In those ways, it just slices the text up to
make it look like a poem, without it having much by way of purposeful effect. It makes use of
caesura and enjambment, but not for any particularly dramatic effect like Seamus Heaney or
Simon Armitage do. It does beg the question about why she does this. For instance, why this:
Three days before Armistice Sunday
and poppies had already been placed
on individual war graves. Before you left,
I pinned one onto your lapel…

And not this:

Three days before Armistice Sunday


and poppies had already been placed
on individual war graves.
Before you left, I pinned one onto your lapel…

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When you aren’t governed by where you put the words, why leave that “Before you left”
dangling at the end of the line, hanging after the caesura?

For me, I think there are several effects worth considering. The first is that it makes the form
seem almost redundant and accidental, like it doesn’t matter. That’s fine, of course. The form can
be just a blank plate to serve words up on, and in the same ways as I discussed in the form
of Remains, it could just be a meaningless form on which to serve ideas.
But I don’t think so.

Perhaps it also shows a bit of carelessness. Typesetters in printers are responsible for making the
print aesthetically pleasing. They make sure in novels that the justified text doesn’t have massive
gaps between words, or if there is hyphenation to make the text nicely justified that the hyphens
fall neatly. I’ll justify this paragraph and you can see what I mean.

Perhaps it also shows a bit of carelessness. Typesetters in printers are responsible for making the
print aesthetically pleasing. They make sure in novels that the justified text doesn’t have massive
gaps between words, or if there is hyphenation to make the text nicely justified that the hyphens
fall neatly. I’ll justify this paragraph and you can see what I mean.
But this is not “neat” book justification, just poor computer justification. The typesetter will take
much more care than I have over the space between words and making sure the space is exactly
even without huge gaps between the words. Poppies seems it’s been arranged by a sloppy
typesetter, or a computer algorithm, careless and unartistic. Functional.
In other ways, it could be much more purposeful – when you don’t stick to the ‘natural’ line
breaks and you split sentences, use plenty of enjambment and caesura, you end up with
something that is quite fragmented and disjointed, with unnatural pauses and hesitations in places
you wouldn’t normally find them. For me, this causes the poem to ‘catch’ in strange places, like
our breath catches and our sentences jar when we are upset and trying not to show it. We have
that little ‘catch’ in a mother’s breath when she says, “Before you left,” where the line break adds
weight to that comma pause. If you agree with me about this being the effect, it certainly does
seem to catch and jar there.

She breaks down a noun phrase too in the first stanza, “disrupting a blockade/of yellow bias” –
when you disrupt a noun phrase with a line break and you’ve even got the word “disrupting” in
there, the enjambment and caesura seem much more purposeful.

Again, we have the catch and jar in her voice in stanza two, with the “shirt’s/upturned collar” and
how she “steeled the softening/of [her] face” which I think seems to support the notion that the
fragmenting, enjambment and caesura are indeed purposeful rather than just being sloppy about
what words go where. She is a woman hardening herself so as not to give her emotions away, and
the disjointed nature of some of those details makes it seem very much as if she has to stop a
second to “steel” herself and gain control over her emotions.

Stanza two runs into stanza three, just like her words…

All my words
flattened, rolled, turned into felt,

slowly melting.

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Here the lines do exactly what the words do, slowly melt into one another, adding to that kind of
jumbled, formless effect, drifting from line to line before regaining a little compsure. Weir uses
the final words at the end of those first lines in stanza three to add emphasis, to leave them
hanging a moment for you to think about.

We land on “threw” which becomes so much more dynamic as a result of that line break pause
that follows on the page. We do the same with “overflowing” and “a split second”. When we get
to line five in that stanza with the full stop at the end, the word “intoxicated” is given so much
more emphasis because of it. These are things I’ll discuss and consider further when thinking
about the language of the poem.

By the time we get to the run-on lines of the final lines in stanza three, the words drift once more
over the lines, just like the bird and the stitching. There’s a freedom and fluidity there which is
not constrained by the line breaks or the sense of the lines. The rhyme of “tree… me… busy” also
helps these lines speed up and run on into the next, picking up pace. They’re easier to read and
more fluid.

The form in the last stanza is more assured. There are fewer unnatural breaks – sometimes verbs
split from their object in “traced/the inscriptions” and “hoping to hear/your playground voice”
(okay, split from its second object in that, since “to hear” is the first object) but it feels less
disjointed than the earlier stanzas, like the poet has found her words and is no longer hesitating
over them.

When we think about the stanza breaks, we are also asked to contemplate the structure and
organisation of the poem, as well as the voice, tense and tone.

When I think about structure, I think about the following:

This explores how the ideas are organised and sequenced, viewpoint/perspective (third person?
First person?) TiP ToP – Time Place Topic Person – shifts? Shift in time? Place? Why are the
ideas in this order? External actions (happenings) vs internal thoughts? Circular structure?
Beginning, middle, end? How does the title weave through the poem? Does the ending link back
or develop from the opening?

Structure is the arrangement and sequence of the ideas, as well as some other aspects. I ask
myself why here and not there?

We have four ‘paragraphs’ rather than stanzas, per se. Much of the reasoning behind these seems
to fall into the domain of structure and organisation, since they seem to have rough ‘topics’ or
ideas. The first is about Poppies in themselves. The second is about the mother’s attempts to care
for her child and her final reflections before her child leaves. I’ll refer to the child as ‘he’ by the
way, only because there is no real indication of whether it is a boy or a girl, only, perhaps the
‘gelled blackthorns’ of the hair, although girls can of course have a short haircut and wear gel. It
could be a male or a female child, of course. I shan’t comment on my own innate sexism that the
child ‘must be’ a boy since the poem is about conflict and seems to be set with a backdrop of war.

The poem opens with a mother who is reminiscing about a moment when she pinned a poppy to
her child’s lapel, and it ends with an impromptu visit to the war memorial where the mother

28
comes into the present moment. It is all written in the past tense, making it more reflective than a
present-tense moment: it is a narrated account of internal conflict, of a mother caring for her
child, setting them free and then the anxiety and worry that plague her having done so, as she
tries to catch a last remnant of her child in the playground.

The first person narration is ambiguous. We do not know whether it is Jane Weir herself or a
persona that she has adopted. It could well be some other mother, or it could be her. The first
person narration allows us to see her internal conflict more clearly than an external viewpoint
would have done: we get to see the inner workings of her thoughts.

29
WAR PHOTOGRAPHER
Analysis of Poem War
Photographer by Carol Ann
Duffy
Updated on January 8, 2020

Carol Ann Duffy | Source

Carol Ann Duffy And A Summary of War


Photographer
War Photographer is a poem that focuses on a man who is in the process of developing his latest
batch of images from his latest war. He is in a darkroom, a place where chemicals meet to
produce photographic images.

Carol Ann Duffy was inspired to write this poem, first published in 1985 in her book Standing
Female Nude, by her photographer friend recently returned from a war-torn foreign country.

In it she contrasts the quiet moments of the developing process at the home of the photographer
with the horrific scenes abroad in the war, any war, that are about to become black and white
images, ready for publishing in a glossy Sunday supplement.

 It is this antithesis that creates the unease for the reader. Here is a man getting paid for
recording human suffering. Without war and all its horrors he wouldn't have a job, yet to do
that job effectively he has to distance himself from the reality of obscene violence.

30
Moral questions arise about the ethical stance of a professional paid to take snaps whilst
innocent people and others are blown to bits or massacred. He doesn't attempt to save anyone;
he lands in a foreign country, takes some photos, leaves and then gets top money for his
photographs.
The reader is drawn into a position of moral ambiguity:

 is it right for someone to do such a thing?


 but without the images of war that he brings back, the general public might not be aware of
what is going on?
 so he is performing a crucial task: telling the stories of those who are suffering, opening a
window on a dark world that many might not want to see?
War Photographer is set in a darkroom, a physical space, but this could easily be a metaphor for
the photographer's heart (and mind). Perhaps all is not well in there as the process of
development takes place, which could well be his memories slowly forming as he flies back
home.

The poem reflects what the poet says about poetry:


'Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing
with facts, I'm dealing with emotion.'

War Photographer is a poem that poses many questions and challenges the reader's sense of
morality. As the poem progresses, with its measured lines and curious rhymes, it seems the
speaker has come to the conclusion that here is a man who is not quite mercenary, not quite
compassionate.

Themes - War Photographer


The themes of War Photographer:

Human Suffering.

War.

Recording War.

Human Reaction To Victims of War.

Lessons To Be learned From War.

War and Art.

Human Morality.

War Photographer
In his darkroom he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he

31
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.
He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
beneath his hands, which did not tremble then
though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.
Something is happening. A stranger’s features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must
and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black and white


from which his editor will pick out five or six
for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick
with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns his living and they do not care.

Analysis of War Photographer Stanza By Stanza


War Photographer has a third person speaker, someone who is 'looking in' on the photographer
as he develops his latest images in the darkroom. This is the traditional way of bringing images
out into the world (which may seem strange in this modern digital age), using liquid chemicals
and photographic paper.
Memory and morals feature strongly.

Stanza 1
The reader is introduced to the war photographer who is alone in his darkroom developing his
photos. Note that alliterative second line spools of suffering which hints at the plight of victims,
and the ordered rows an image suggestive of headstones in a cemetery?
That red light surely signifies bloody danger, but it softly glows, contrasting heavily with the
suffering and violence. This darkroom is a quiet place, like a church according to the speaker,
and the man is a priest about to intone (recite in a religious manner, without high or low
intonation) Mass (a eucharistic service).

The last line of this first stanza gives three cities. Belfast is the capital of Northern Ireland, known
for the Troubles of the 1970s and 80s (involving the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries). Beirut is the
capital of Lebanon, war torn for decades. Phnom Penh is the biggest city in Cambodia, also
subject to violence during the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 70s.
All flesh is grass comes from the bible's old testament, Isaiah 40/6.
Stanza 2

This is his job of work. He uses chemicals to manually develop his pictures. He's nervous which
makes him tremble. He didn't tremble when taking his photos but he's trembling now because he
knows the images will affect him.
Even though he's back home in the quiet countryside of England, with only the vagaries of the
weather to contend with. Here there are fields but these do not hold dangers unlike those in the

32
war-torn country he's been visiting, where mines and bombs explode and maim people, even the
children who are running away from the violence.
Again the contrast is in evidence - he's home and safe yet he knows he's about to confront those
realities of war again. The imagery is vivid and frightening.
Stanza 3

The developing process is well underway and now the first hint of an image appears on the
photographic paper. It is a stranger (note the inclusion of the word strange) and it starts to twist
before his eyes. This is a curious verb to use - twist - as twisted features infer something not
right, something out of order.

The speaker describes the image as a half-formed ghost, suggesting that this is an eerie image,
like something out of a horror story. His memory is triggered and he is able to recall a wife, her
cries, and his need to get approval (somehow, without words, perhaps with just a gesture and a
knowing look) before he shot the victim.

Stanza 4
He's taken a hundred pictures of the victims but only a few will be chosen for the newspaper's
supplement. He's done his job, now it's up to the editor to decide which images the mass public
get to see.
On the Sunday, the day of rest, many people will be affected by the photographs. This is the
desired effect, to disturb the reader and get a reaction from those not often used to seeing
images of war on a day away from work, as they relax before going off to the pub.
The final two lines see the photographer in a plane perhaps on his way to his next assignment, or
flying over a battlefield or bombed city on his way home, knowing that he's simply doing his job,
like a true professional and that he cannot risk getting emotionally involved in the horrors.
This is what the poem asks again and again: how can this man remain impassive, how can this
human being not get involved emotionally in the horrors of war when he's there at the front line, a
witness to death and destruction and cruelty?

He risks his neck to get the pictures out yes, but while somebody is dying in front of his eyes he's
more worried about the focus on his lens than the human suffering involved. Is this morally
justified? How does he cope with the guilt or the lack of?

Form And Structure of War Photographer


War Photographer is a stanzaic poem, that is, it has four stanzas each with six lines, making a
total of twenty four lines.
These six line stanzas are sestets and some of the lines rhyme, giving a rhyme scheme of:
abbcdd

These rhymes are full (eyes/cries...must/dust) which brings familiarity and tight closure. The first
and fourth lines of each stanza do not rhyme which introduces a tension between the sounds'
togetherness or not.

Metre (Meter in American English) of War Photographer


Metrically the poem has a pentameter base but there is no consistency. Some lines are longer
(up to 14 syllables), others shorter (down to 8 syllables).
Let's take a closer look at the first stanza:

33
In his / darkroom / he is fin / ally / alone
with spools / of suffe / ring set out / in ord / ered rows.
The on / ly light / is red / and soft / ly glows,
as though / this were / a church / and he
a priest /prepar / ing to / intone / a Mass.
Belfast. / Beirut. / Phnom Penh. / All flesh /is grass.

Line 1 has a two trochees, an anapaest, a pyrrhic and another iamb, giving a mild trochaic
pentameter, a real mix of feet.
Line 2 has two iambs starting followed by an anapaest and two more iambs which give a
rhythmical regularity.
Line 3 the only pure iambic pentameter line in the stanza.

Line 4 iambic again save for the quiet pyrrhic (no stressed syllables) midway.
Line 5 The three cities are all trochaic, stress on the first syllable, whilst the final clause is iambic.

War Photographer - All flesh is grass


In line 6 of the first stanza note the end part - All flesh is grass. This comes from
the old testament of the bible, Isaiah 40/6:

The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the
goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.

What Are The Literary/Poetic Devices In War


Photographer?
Alliteration

When two or more words are close together in a line and start with the same consonant,
producing sound textures:
his dark room he...spools of suffering set...as though this...a priest preparing...He has...Solutions
slop...his hands...which simple weather...how he...without words to do what...between the bath...
Assonance
When two or more words are close together in a line and have similar sounding vowels:
weather can dispel...beneath the feet...which his editor will pick...Sunday's supplement...his
living.

Caesura
A pause or break in a line, often a comma or other punctuation, to pause the flow. For example in
lines:
He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays

Something is happening. A stranger's features


Enjambment

34
When a line runs on into the next without punctuation, maintaining the sense and momentum.
For example:
A hundred agonies in black and white

from which his editor will pick out five or six


for Sunday's supplement. The reader's eyeballs prick

Metaphor

Substituting one thing for another to deepen meaning and effect. For example:

 the darkroom could be a metaphor for the photographer's emotional state of mind.
Simile
Comparison between one thing and another, as in:

as though this were a church and he


a priest preparing to intone a Mass.

35
TISSUE
Analysis of Poem Tissue
by Imtiaz Dharker
Updated on May 13, 2019

Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker | Source

Imtiaz Dharker and A Summary of Tissue


Tissue is a deceptive short poem that takes the reader into the fragile worlds of paper, maps,
imagined architecture and living human skin. Paper becomes an extended metaphor for all
of life.
In this poem everything seems connected, just like tissue itself - a number of living cells
forming a thin structure through which light shines through.
This poem was inspired by a discovery of the poet herself. She happened to find a piece of
old paper at the back of a book and on it were names of people with birth dates and death
dates.

36
So it was that the poet took off on a journey with words, beginning with a simple piece of
paper that gave her the idea of connective tissue, connection to the human world of breath
and skin, of life being a journey made possible by interconnected cells - tissue.
In the poets own words:
...scraps of paper tell the real story of our lives...
Imtiaz Dharker, a 'Scottish Muslim Calvinist', is both poet and filmmaker, so there is often a
high degree of shifting imagery in many of her poems as she changes the angle of her poetic
lens to focus in on different aspects of a theme.
In Tissue the major themes are that of:
 fragility of human life - juxtaposed with the power of nature (light).
 dependence - on paper.
 recording and life communication - how words and paper combine.
 transformation - turning weakness into strength, surface into depth....to alter things.
 interconnectedness - how tissue literally and metaphorically allows life to happen.
The poem was first published in the book A Terrorist at my Table, 2006.

Religious Connection in the poem


Tissue?
In Tissue the speaker refers to a piece of paper found in the back of a book,
the Koran (for example) which is the holy book of the Muslim faith. On that
paper are written the names of family members, suggesting a long
relationship with the Koran and Allah, God.

Religion is seen as part of the fabric of life, another element within the
extended metaphor.

Analysis of Tissue Stanza by Stanza


Tissue is a free verse poem of 10 stanzas, 9 of which are quatrains with the last being a single
line. There are no end rhymes and the metre (meter in American English) varies from line to
line.
So this is very much a conversational poem, it mirrors real life speech - no full rhyme, no
regular plodding iambic beats.
That title Tissue could mean several things - it is ambiguous. There's a tissue which means a
thin paper wipe for blowing one's nose; thin skin tissue; internal membranes... tissue paper

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that artists use....by keeping the title to one word the poet creates a sense of something all
encompassing.
Stanza 1
From the title the reader already has an overview of the theme - that of tissue, connecting,
empowering, together with the idea of strength through fragility.
Paper is a translucent material, it allows light to pass through. Hold a piece of paper up to the
light and you can see through it.
This is obvious enough, yet in the second and third lines, reached
through enjambment (when one line runs into the next with no punctuation, helping build
momentum, maintaining the sense) the abstract enters the equation.
The fact that paper allows light through, is helpless to stop nature, means that life can change,
can be transformed. The speaker's ambiguity enters at an early stage and resonates throughout
the poem.
The last line of this first stanza gives more detail for the reader - this is old paper, used by
human hands.
Stanza 2
The emphasis is on a specific kind of paper, the family history written on it and placed in a
special book, the Koran in this case, where generations are recorded, a common enough
occurrence back in the day.
So the idea of tradition is reinforced - age, histories, well-used...
Stanza 3
The first three stanzas focus on this family connection. Individuals are given a special place
and it is paper that unites them all. There is a sensuality to the lines...smoothed, stroked,
turned...and yet no sense of personal involvement from the speaker. This narrative is so far a
little distant.
Stanza 4
Things change in this stanza. The speaker is now revealed in the first person and the reader
gets an insight into their imagination.
The image is of paper buildings, models perhaps, but remember that they are paper and that
paper is a metaphor for life in this poem. They represent the fragility of life and the speaker is
wondering if a sigh could knock them down, or the wind collapse them.
We humans are made of tissue, we may appear strong but fundamentally we're extremely
susceptible, we are only here through the action of nature, which is all powerful.
Stanza 5
The journey we take is sometimes political, we have to conform to boundaries and borders.
Our lives are mapped out by nature which is unaffected by these conventional symbols on a
map.

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Note the pauses in this stanza, which slow the reader down but also the enjambment gives the
reader a chance to flow from line to line.
Stanza 6
Fine slips are receipts, things we get when we make a purchase. We are held together by
economies small and large, and the idea that money flies our lives is yet another strong
image.
A thin string connects us to the earth; the money kite we cannot let go of.
Stanza 7
The architect connects with the buildings; the designer of things. The speaker's perspective
changes again...could use...an echo of could alter from the first stanza.
There is a hint of the ideal, of what humanity could become. Who is this architect? It could be
God, or an intelligence, the creator of a different life.
Stanza 8
Out with the old life (bricks and blocks), in with the new, refreshed by nature (light). Light
can get the better of pride and a new dawn help find humanity a way through.
Stanza 9
Things made to last - the brick and block designs - are no longer wanted? This is a tricky part
of the poem, where the metaphorical meets the symbolic meets the surreal.
It is possible to read different things into these lines.
All that can be said is that a circle has been nearly completed....from the paper of the first
stanza on which the lives of real people, flesh and blood, have been recorded, on to a life
journey and through to the idea of transforming the structure of life so that it is at one with
nature.
Stanza 10
The last line creates the image of a grand design finally becoming human...your skin...is that
of the reader or anyone? We are all paper, the lines on our skin a record of who we are, where
we have been, where we might go and what we might become.

Literary/Poetic Devices in Tissue


Alliteration
When two or more words close to each other in a line begin with the same consonant,
bringing added texture to sound:
lets the light....who was born to whom...smoothed and stroked...rivers make, roads...
Assonance
When two or more words with similar sounding vowels are close to each other in a line, as
with:
the kind you find....might fly our lives like paper kites

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Caesura
A break in a line often caused by punctuation. For example:
died where and how, on which sepia date,
Enjambment
When a line runs on into the next without punctuation, maintaining momentum and sense.
Enjambment appears quite frequently. For example:
If buildings were paper, I might
feel their drift, see how easily
they fall away on a sigh, a shift
in the direction of the wind.
Simile
Comparison between two things:
might fly our lives like paper kites

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THE EMIGREE
Analysis of the Poem "The
Emigree" by Carol Rumens
Updated on January 10, 2020

Carol Rumens | Source

Carol Rumens And A Summary of The Emigree


The Emigree is a poem about a person who was forced to leave their home country and journey
to foreign shores to be safe. The first person speaker looks back with affection at the land they
once called home but which is now possibly run by a tyrant or caught up in war.
This poem focuses on the mind and memory of the speaker who had to flee danger as a child. In
their imagination their former city is still lit with sunlight - a motif for optimism and happiness - yet
dangers persist in the form of the anonymous oppressor, 'they', who threaten and censor.

Carol Rumens, academic and poet, is well known for her poetry on such subjects as gender,
class, foreign culture and a sense of place. She often likes to go far away into alternative interiors
in her poems but then has a need to return home, her plain language a trustworthy guide.

The Emigree works as a poem because the speaker sounds authentic. As Carol Rumens herself
explains:
'I do try to keep close to my spoken diction.....I have to be able to say the poems aloud and feel
them naturally in my mouth.'

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First published in the book Thinking of Skins 1993, The Emigree remains fresh and relevant
because with each new global conflict we see on t.v. and social media the effect of displacement
on the faces of children.

What we don't see so obviously is the hidden hurt in their minds despite the smiles and
resilience.

Analysis - What Is The Meaning of Poem The


Emigree?
The Emigree is a free verse poem in three stanzas totalling 25 lines. It does not have a set
rhyme scheme or a consistent regular metre.
The speaker's tone is conversational, unemotional and in the end positive; they might be relaying
information to a friend or family member or interested person. Or perhaps they're filling in a
journal or diary or wanting to start a story.

 Basically, the speaker describes the city they left behind as a child in positive terms,
referring to the fact that they are 'branded by an impression of sunlight.' - and that this
original affirming view will prevail no matter the news they hear to the contrary.
Childhood memory of a fixed, clear sunlit world, perhaps idealised, takes precedence over the
negative. Time hasn't darkened or diminished the memory, despite the hardships endured and
the current state of their former homeland.

Basic Analysis of The Emigree


The Émigrée begins with a cliche which is straight out of a fairy tale - There once was a
country...but there the parallel ends and the reality kicks in as the first person speaker states
quite directly that she left that fairy tale behind. For good.

But what kind of reality have we here? The second line informs the reader that this is a memory,
and memories are always prone to distortion and often with that comes deception.
She's looking back to a time in November (the speaker we presume is a female because of the
feminine form of the title émigrée) but has to be told that something November brought - the cold,
the war, the strife, the change - irrevocably altered her city.

 Note the use of that tiny word 'it' meaning the country. She doesn't give her country a name,
perhaps because it is just too painful to repeat. Seven times that tiny word appears in the
first stanza.
She says that no matter the negative news coming from her country she will always view it as a
place of sunlight. She is 'branded' which implies that the memory is scarred into her skin.
Although branded may have painful associations, here it seems a positive. Sunlight is tattoed
onto her. Nothing will ever change.

The metaphor of a 'filled paperweight' is a little odd but suggests something solid and stable,
which holds things together.
In the first part of the second stanza she consolidates her positive view of the city she had to flee.
The language so far reflects this rose-tinted memory: sunlight-clear, sunlight, graceful, glow
...she's looking back with affection despite the mention of tanks and frontiers.

Midway through the stanza there is a more sober reflection. Now an adult she can see that when
a child her vocabulary, her knowledge of life, didn't contain anything - it was like a hollow doll -
quite a powerful simile - and that now she's in a position to understand better just what it was she
went through.

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But she still doesn't know if it's the truth, or a truth that will be accepted in her old country. This
could be a longing for a past reality that never really existed. Yet she can't erase the
memories...they have a positive flavour.

Her identity has been lost but the memories are still there, almost tangible. Her country becomes
like a creature, a pet, a child?

The personification of the city is a comfort it seems. She dances with those memories but there is
a dark side, something hidden and a necessary part of the life she led in her former city. The
collective third person - they - are these the walls or are they dangerous people from her past?
Without the sun - a motif for all things clear and positive - there can be no shadow, the personal
emotional side of life. They're mutually inclusive.

What Is The Context of The Emigree?


The context of The Emigree is displacement, that is, forced upheaval of local people and the
need to flee a home country. Although there are no specific names in the poem, no country, no
city, this works to the poem's advantage because the mind of the speaker is a universal
substitute.

The poet has consciously chosen not to give a name of a country or city so that the reader is free
to think of one of their choosing. There is unfortunately conflict happening at all times somewhere
in the world - it seems never to stop - so to give a specific name would perhaps detract from the
universality of the emigree's mind.

Perhaps the speaker is reluctant to name specific places and lands because of regret, or pain, or
sorrow.
The poem focuses on the memories the speaker has of their former home city and country.
These memories are mostly positive, hence the sunlight motif which represents hope, happiness
and clarity.

Childhood memories are often the strongest and deepest yet can also deceive. The speaker, as
an adult, confesses that no matter what news comes out of that country now, they will always
keep a positive impression of it - sunlit and clear.
So whilst the poem is a rather intimate and personal account of a past existence, the context is
much larger, much broader - it is that of human conflict and human aggression, which forces
people out of their homes and country, but can never erase the memories.

Literary Devices in The Emigree


There are several devices used:
ellipsis

Used in narratives as omission of words or phrases or events, usually written as three


dots...where the reader has to fill in the missing words. The first line contains an ellipsis.
metaphor

When one subject is implied to be the other. In this example from the first stanza the paperweight
is metaphorically the original view of the news:
The worst news I receive of it cannot break

my original view, the bright, filled paperweight.


personification

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When an object or thing is given human characteristics - figurative language. In the final stanza
there are several examples:
my city comes to me

my city takes me dancing


my city hides behind me.

simile

When one thing is compared to another, as with:


close like waves
like a hollow doll

docile as paper
synaesthia

When characters, ideas or things are described which appeal to more than one sense:
It tastes of sunlight.

Analysis of The Emigree - Structure


The Emigree has three similar stanzas, blocks of text with lines that are uniform and roughly the
same length.

Each stanza is separate, they don't flow into one another which reflects three different
perspectives:

 i) the speaker gives an overall positive viewpoint of her life as a child in the country she had
to leave. This is fixed and will not change.
 ii) the speaker outlines the basic dilemma she still faces - whether to trust her memory
which may have become tainted by conflict and subsequent lies and strife.
 iii) the speaker shares concerns about her identity and her past.

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CHECKING OUT ME
HISTORY
John Agard's poetry has political complexities. Daljit Nagra delivers close readings of
three of Agard's poems, analysing how each engages with questions of identity,
nationhood and the brutal legacies of empire and enslavement.

When I think of John Agard’s poetry I think of the political complexities of his work. The kind of
Political poetry I enjoy in Agard’s verse is the complex poetics that speak back to the source of
power. This type of poetry addresses an institution or a powerful individual who has set in motion
a culture that creates problems for individuals. The voice of such a poem, if high art is being
created, will not simply wag a finger but will use a range of tones to explore why power was
enforced in such a way and what effect it has had on the speaker, or its effect on the mass of
people the speaker is representing.

Born in 1949 in what was then British Guiana, Agard moved to Britain in the late 1970s. It’s hard
to see his poetry as separate from his background. He is a poet who has experienced the effects
of empire both in Guyana where he spent his first two decades, and in the source of imperial
power in the motherland, Britain, where he has lived for the past four decades. He has a strong
Caribbean accent and he reads his work with brio, with gusto and with an energetic delivery. He
stresses certain words, often holding on to a syllable for a few seconds or speeding up and
glossing over words for the sake of the rhythm. This creates the impression, for me anyway, that
he’s attacking the English language by refreshing the sounds of words, by placing these words in
unconventional verse forms, often from the Caribbean and by using phonetics and slang that
takes us away from standard English and from the Oxford English Dictionary. In addition, his
syntax is often his own and represents his own natural spoken voice. When reading an Agard
poem, we are constantly aware that we are not hearing a typical English poet from an elite
background, but instead we are inhabiting the vowels of a minority ethnic. This deliberate refusal
to mimic the voice of the national poetics is itself a Political act; it is the assertion of the
Caribbean voice placed on a par with the standard voice of British poets. Agard’s poetry is
published in Britain by the esteemed publisher, Bloodaxe, and this ensures that his poetry is read
and heard alongside the white British poets who are his peers.

Now to the three poems, ‘Checking Out Me History’, ‘Flag’ and ‘Half Caste’. What immediately
strikes me about Agard’s titles is their political intentions, which are laid bare from the outset. We
first enter each of these poems knowing that there will be an engagement with a complex strife.
We know about the slave trade, and we know Agard is of mixed heritage that includes Spanish
and African. So the title ‘Checking Out Me History’, suggests a quest that seems full of
multicultural wonder mixed with empire and its brutal legacy. 'Flag' is a title that announces its
own symbolic properties of nationhood, of patriotism which is revered and reviled, perhaps in
equal measure. Finally, the title ‘Half Caste’ is a bold assertion of a familiar term that became
politicised and was seen as pejorative; we are keen to learn Agard’s precise attitude to this term,
especially when applied to himself.

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‘Checking Out Me History’

Let’s look further into ‘Checking Out Me History’. The poem opens with an emphatic address,
‘Dem tell me’, which is repeated in the second line. From the outset, we are in the world of
accusation, of a central powerbase inculcating minority ethnics. ‘Dem’ and ‘me’, with the upper
case opening for each line, seems to give greater authority or menace to this collective pronoun
‘Dem’. The opening word ‘Dem’, and the smaller closing word ‘me’, of each line offers a divide, a
sharp contrast which is played out in the poem. The poet feels blinded from his own identity; the
white-owned historical narrative has ‘Bandage up me eye with me won history/ Bind me to me
own identity’. This is a shocking idea, that someone should feel blinded, deliberately denied
knowledge of his own ancestors and role models. The poem could continue a list approach by
telling us what the poet has been taught – Lord Nelson, Christopher Columbus, Florence
Nightingale, Robin Hood and so on. Instead, Agard uses the poem as an opportunity to educate
his readership cheekily. This is the politics of subversion because Agard recommends an
alternative history, such as ‘Shaka de great Zulu’ or incidents such as the one between ‘de
Caribs and de Arawaks’. The poem interlaces outrage with a celebration of great world heroes.
The strong and unusual rhymes and rhythms are closer to the Caribbean voice than the standard
English voice, and help to emphasise the speaker’s need to honour heroic figures similar to
himself.

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KAMIKAZE
Kamikaze: some supplementary thoughts.
Halfway through a PiXL session on Friday, I checked my work emails. I wasconcentrating
(honest!) but I always seem to have a little corner of my mind checking in on the faculty and/or
Twitter. To my delight, I found that Beatrice Garland had emailed me. The. Beatrice. Garland.
I’m not embarrassed to be star-struck. It was amazing. I practically forced my phone
into @xris32’s hand – look! Read it! – and then furiously wrote @tillyteacher a note:
“the actualBeatrice Garland has sent me an actual email!”

Beatrice Garland had replied to an email I sent her last week. I had been thinking over some of
the sound patterns in Kamikaze and emailed her about it. The response she sent was actually
about the context of the poem, with links to a wonderful video (shared below) and more
information on the pilots.

This blog is about my teaching of the poem thus far, details of Beatrice Garland’s correspondence
with me and a few more bits I’ve been thinking about since teaching it. I’ll be covering the poem
with Y10 before half-term and I am already looking forward to it. I haven’t bothered to include a
whole poetry analysis here – there are loads of resources already available in the public domain.

The background.
I didn’t go into too much detail with my students on this one – just the basics of the kamikaze and
the notion of shame. Essentially, I used the following information for this (I’m including it here
as a quick copy and paste might be of use to other teachers):
A kamikaze was a Japanese suicide pilot in World War 2. Their aircrafts were loaded with
explosives and sent on missions to fly into enemy warships. Inevitably, the pilot would die in
these attacks.
Kamikaze pilots were given intensive training prior to their suicide missions. As well as
explaining the daily physical punishment which the kamikaze pilots were put through, Wikipedia
explains that “Pilots were given a manual which detailed how they were supposed to think,
prepare and attack. From this manual, pilots were told to “attain a high level of spiritual training.”
These things, among others, were meant to put the pilot into the mindset in which he would be
mentally ready to die.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze#Training)

Interviews with surviving kamikaze soldiers.


Beatrice Garland sent me this link to a Guardian article on Kamikaze pilots. It includes an 8
minute video, which I will show my Y10, although if you prefer to just use the written article, rest
assured it covers the same ground. The wonderful thing about the video is that it’s an interview
with two real kamikaze pilots, now in their later years, discussing their experiences.
She also sent me the kamikaze soldiers’ oath, with which she commented “very salutary, to see
how demanding the precepts they had to swear to.” I totally agree; it is illuminating to see how
the expectations placed on these men:
A soldier must make loyalty his obligation.
A soldier must make propriety his way of life.
A soldier must highly esteem military valour.
A soldier must have a high regard for righteousness.

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A soldier must live a simple life.

Kamikaze – a precursor of today’s suicide bombers.


Remember that AO3 requires that pupils show understanding of the relationships between texts
and the contexts in which they were written. That’s the AO in its entirety and for this paper, it’s
worth 7.5%. Unless you subscribe to the New Criticism movement (briefly – context has no
relevance to the literature and the novel/poem/play is a world in its own right), then you’ll see the
value of understanding this poem in context. There is value in reflecting on our own existing
knowledge of the world, which I would argue cannot be disregarded when reading a work of
literature. Additionally, we can gain a deeper understanding of the significance of a literary work
if we consider the political, social and historical context. Perhaps we can gain a better
understanding of our own contexts through our understanding of the poem.
So, for the sake of the Assessment Objectives or for one’s own approach to literary texts, the
context in which Kamikaze was written can be reflected upon. Garland notes that the willingness
for individuals to die for their beliefs is nothing new and we still witness such events in
contemporary times. This should help hugely with making links between the poems.
I cannot say this as succinctly as Beatrice Garland, so here’s what she said on this area:
“They were of course the precursors of today’s suicide bombers, prepared to die for what they
believed in. But there have been individuals willing to do that throughout history, even though
we tend to think of it as a modern phenomenon. The young men driving lorries into crowds are
virtually identical, with rather less technology at their disposal: they know they will die at the
end of it.”

The concept of shame, the cultural context and Bushido.


In your teaching of the poem, you may have identified the shame brought upon the family when
the father comes home, having abandoned the kamikaze directive. It occurred to me that our
understanding of shame may have shifted over time and does not necessarily transcend cultural
contexts. My pupils understand ‘shame’ as little more than ‘embarrassment’ – some came up with
‘embarrassment mixed with guilt’. Shame, in western cultures, is also understood to be a
particularly negative experience. In western culture, shame is something private, something
experienced and processed internally. This was not quite the same for the kamikaze soldiers. In
order to understand the poem (especially the character of the pilot and his wife), it is helpful to
consider this concept within the cultural context. We now look to the Bushido code.
The samurai code of Bushido is one place we can look when seeking answers for the origins of
the kamikaze. Some cite ‘obedience to authority or sheer peer pressure’ (Hollway, 2016) as
alternative reasons for the soldiers’ willingness to fly these suicide missions, but the Bushido
code is interesting to look at here, especially when considering the concept of shame. In
Premodern Japanese samurai culture, ‘the notion of shame [was] a powerful public concept even
while rooted in the innermost depth of an individual’s dignity.’ (Ikegami, 2003). Shame was a
desired quality for both the samurai and kamikaze soldiers. There was honour in feeling shame
and therefore a belief that defending one’s honour would enable the pilots to undertake the
kamikaze missions. Linguistically, ‘shame (haji) in Japanese can also represent the private
passive emotion related to concerns for one’s social reputation’ (ibid.). Shame is tied up with
pride, dignity, and honour. In order to approach this poem, we need to understand that the
soldiers felt shame, lived with shame and that they were chosen for kamikaze missions because
their deep desire to preserve their honour and dignity meant that they were likely to undertake
these missions.

Lastly, the sounds.


Look at the first three stanzas of the poem. I’ve highlighted some of the fricative sounds below.
Fricatives are sounds which are formed in the mouth by air being forced through a small space.
The physical position of the mouth (tongue position, tongue movement, soft palette position etc.)

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determine the exact sound produced, but for simplicity, we’re looking at sounds like /f/ (as in fin),
/v/ (as in vision), /ð/ (as in this), /θ/ (as in thin), /ʃ/ (as in should) and /ʒ/ (as in measure). This list
is not exhaustive; if you want to know more, start with looking at the International Phonetic
Alphabet online.
There seem to be a lot of fricatives here. A disproportional amount, in fact. Of course, you don’t
need to equip GCSE students with the phonological details that I’ve just laid out, but perhaps the
following ideas may be of interest to you or your students: the sounds brought about the buzzing
noise of a plane prior to take-off for me. The sounds evoked an unpleasant, anxiety-filled
sensation – like that feeling when you can’t concentrate because something’s lurking in the
background. The fricatives almost hiss at you; they’re unpleasant to listen to and they echo the
uncomfortable mood of the poem. There are 18 /f/ sounds in the first three stanzas and none in the
last two. Maybe the silence he’s subjected to after returning home is reflected here.
Students rarely write well about the effect of alliteration. However, it’s possible for them to
comment on any repeated sounds and what these evoke for them. I hope this has given you some
points for reflection.

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