Persuasive Writing: War and Perspective

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In Robert Southey’s “The Battle of Blenheim”, the writer uses age and experience as a method of portraying two very different perspectives of the war that took place in Blenheim. Throughout the ballad, there is a very noticeable phrase that’s mentioned many times. Old Kasper, a man who is a father, has experienced the effects of war, and is literally named “Old” for the sake of being only portrayed as a man experienced in life, always refers to the battle as a “famous victory” or a “great victory”. It becomes more and more evident this phrase was a result of conditioning and propaganda post-war to mask its tragedies when Kasper’s son asks him about the war. "Now tell us all about the war, And what they fought each other for." "It was the English," Kaspar cried, "Who put the French to rout; But what they fought each other for, I could not well make out; But everybody said," quoth he, "That 'twas a famous victory…" (5-6) When asked about why the war was fought for, the man cannot answer and says he “could not well make out” why they were in dispute, or what good came of it when Peterkin asked “What good came of it at last?”. He doesn’t ponder the fact that he does not know the reason why thousands of men died for a cause unknown to him, all he ever says was that it was a “famous victory” and he feels like it’s enough to reason. He must have had the same question, which was answered in the same way by the person he was asking. And through this method of conditioning he was taught to accept things and this has changed into reasoning for him. Another thing to mention is that nearing the later stanzas of the poem, the writer starts to write “quoth he” instead of “he said” as a little hint in saying it that what he said was not his own words, but of another person, further showing the negative effects of the post-war. The result of this conditioning is the
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