Oral Speech, The War Works Hard

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Dunya Mikhail portrays the realities of war through the use of personification and lack of punctuation. As you can see the structure of the poem almost resembles that of a list, creating the effect of life during the war, long and routine. Through the use of action verbs such as swings, summons and digs for example she is using this language to show what the war does by giving it human qualities (read examples). The start of the poem (read first 3 lines) has quite a sarcastic tone and I think this shows how she feels towards the military glorifying war, doing whatever they can to convince you to join. As the poem progresses, Mikhail begins to mock the routine of war, (wakes the sirens…dispatches ambos…swings corpses through the air) therefore showing us the harmful effects of war. Dunya Mikhail portrays the realities of war through the use of personification and lack of punctuation. As you can see the structure of the poem almost resembles that of a list, creating the effect of life during the war, long and routine. Through the use of action verbs such as swings, summons and digs for example she is using this language to show what the war does by giving it human qualities (read examples). The start of the poem (read first 3 lines) has quite a sarcastic tone and I think this shows how she feels towards the military glorifying war, doing whatever they can to convince you to join. As the poem progresses, Mikhail begins to mock the routine of war, (wakes the sirens…dispatches ambos…swings corpses through the air) therefore showing us the harmful effects of war. Today, I’ll be analysing the poem, The War Works Hard, by Dunya Mikhail. She’s an Iraqi-American poet who has been awarded the UN human rights award for freedom of writing. She has experienced war first hand and was forced to flee Iraq in 1996. The purpose of this poem is to display the effects of war on
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