Both Dawe and Slessor use powerful imagery to illustrate their anti-war sentiments. The two poems address the gravity of war and the awful sacrifices of men too young to die and the use of imagery in each adds another dimension and plays a crucial part in emphasizing the message of pieces. Imagery is used in both poems to create a sense of unification in death, both between the families of the dead boys as in homecoming when Dawe used imagery such as ‘the spider grief swings’ through the ‘wide web of suburbs’ as the news of death reaches each house and unifies the whole country in mourning. But a different type of unification in beach burial as Slessor unifies the dead soldiers from both sides of the war, ‘the sand joins them together’ in their graves, they are all labelled as ‘unknown soldiers’ and Slessor describes them all as ‘gone in search of the same landfall’. Another type of imagery that appears in both poems in the description of the war itself and the imagery used reinforces the brutality of it, so is the aim of both poems.
Through ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ Owen is baled to infer his bitterness towards and rejection of the British Military that left so many men to die, so many young lives taken without the respect of having proper burial rites. The
When John Hickam sees his son and enquires to how the football training went, close camera angles show us the disappointment that Homer experiences on his face and as the camera cuts back to John we see how he thinks his son is weak. But as Homer’s dad says that he can work in the mine Joe Johnston deliberately cuts back to Homer to show the viewer that Homer’s face is forlorn and has a very stern expression-he does not want to work in the mine. The father and son have very different views and it is what is making the relationship that exists are very strained one. Other camera angles in this scene consistently show John Hickam being higher and bigger than Homer. As the scene continues, this technique
Literary Analysis “Things They Carried” by Tim O’ Brien Admittedly, the greatest fear of a soldier is the fear of death. The mere thought of being shot and buried in a mud with a bunch of other corpses or getting stuck and buried alive in a tunnel under the tons of earth, makes a person have goosebumps. In his story “The Things They Carried”, Tim O’Brien managed to explicitly elucidate the burden the soldiers carried throughout the Vietnam War and more importantly, he portrayed that the fear of death could be eclipsed by more frightening things. The story appears to have to a peculiar structure. Particularly, the actions are repeated throughout the story but described from different angle or in more details.
When he returns, he tells the villagers about how he has miraculously escaped from his torturers. He also tells them shocking stories about the atrocities committed against the Jews by Hitler’s regime. When Elie and the other villagers do not believe his stories, thinking he has gone mad, Moshe weeps and tells his story again. As time passes, the Nazis treat the Jews worse and worse. First they shift the Jewish people to live in ghettos; then they arrest them and transport them to Birkenau, the reception center that leads to Auschwitz.
I believe that Owen and Sassoon chose to write poetry about the war as a way to express their feelings as well as a way to express their feelings as well as a way to contradict the propaganda and tell people what was really going on when the sent their relatives to war. During ‘A Working Party’ by Sassoon, it starts of describing the way a man walked through the trenches, and by doing so, also described the conditions of the trenches in the first three verses. By the fifth verse, the man previously described, has become dehumanised and turned into ‘a jolting lump’ showing that in life he was a person, in death, a lump of flesh and bones. Going on, the next three verses are describing what the now deceased man was like, talking about his wife and children, picturing him as an ordinary man and how the only thing he had to look forward to was a ‘tot of rum’ to send him to sleep. In the last verse, Sassoon says the simplicity of how the man died and how quick his life ended, an ‘instant split’ and ’all went out’.
O’Brien writes “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing-these were intangibles, but intangibles has their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” (108) Death changes a solder. Cross’s solders all told jokes after the death of Ted Lavender. This was their way of making themselves deal with the loss of a close friend and soldier. “Zapped while zipping” (107) is what they all said because Lavender died while returning from going to the bathroom.
03.05 Fascination with Fear By: Gabrielle Laurenzo The Premature Burial is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe where he discovers the narrator’s fear of being buried alive by analyzing examples of this event. The narrator explains how terrifying it was for him being prematurely buried. The setting takes place in the middle of the 19th century at the narrator’s home in Richmond, Virginia. At the end of the story, the narrator explains how, “There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell—but the imagination of man is no innocent, exploring its every cavern is not without risk. Alas!
Unfortunately one soldier doesn’t get his mask on in time and suffers a horrific death. Owen then describes the nightmares he has after witnessing such an awful sight which leads up to the moral message at the end of the poem. Wilfred Owen uses a number of literary techniques to describe the physical and mental suffering of the soldiers marching back to base. For example imagery is expressed with the use of the simile “like old beggars, under sacks” is effective because it compares the young soldiers to old beggars showing that the war has prematurely aged them and the sacks refer to the heavy bags of equipment they carry on their backs. A similar example would be the simile “coughing like hags” again a reference to being old as a hag is an elderly woman.
This simile is an important contrast of the information people were fed at the time of soldiers being strong and proud. Owen strips away the image of a glorified war to reveal the bitter and cruel nature of the war. The bitter imagery “Coughing like hags” and “but limped on” also develops the idea of these young man seeming old. Owen takes pity on these tired and weary soldiers as he describes them in the most unglamorous, inglorious manner. The statement “all went lame, all blind’, while being somewhat hyperbolic suggests that the soldiers had lost all previous objectives of war along with the line “cursed through sludge”.