How Does Duffy Reveal Her Attitude to War and Soldiers

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How Does Duffy reveal her attitude to war and soldiers? In The Falling Soldier, Duffy takes the opportunity to use the photograph of the man’s ‘last breath’ to try and rewrite history, creating several different pleasant images of what the photo could of been representing, compared to the harsh reality. Duffy in both The Falling Soldier and Last Post shows the same theme of her trying to show what she wished, could have happened to the innocent soldiers. ‘If poetry could truly tell it backwards, then it would’ this is Duffy basically telling us that if she could rewrite history with her poems then she would. In the poem The Falling Soldier, which is in relation to the photograph by Robert Capa, Duffy begins the poem by using colloquial language such as ‘flop’ and ‘kip’ to create a very casual everyday image about how the photo could be interoperated. Even though the poem starts off with a positive tone, the tone quickly shifts with the phrase ‘No; worse.’ then following with ‘The shadow you cast as you fall is the start of a shallow grave’ as she describes the truth and reality of the soldiers fall. She makes it sounds as if it was inevitable and was always going to happen. ‘They give medals though, to the grieving partners, mothers, daughters, sons of the brave.’ This almost sarcastic phrase expressing that as if a medal they can’t even accept for themselves makes it all ok and worth dying for. She distinctively uses ‘they’ in this phrase, to emphasise the fact that these people are nameless and are too cowardly to take responsibility for what they causing. This is another similarity it has with Last Post, when Duffy rewords the famous phrase ‘Dulce- No-Decorum - No Pro patria mori’ emphasising it is not sweet or noble to die for ones country. Duffy’s imaginative, compassionate dream of another version of the war is ironically juxtaposed to Wilfred Owen’s
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