english war and conflict poems

ily flynt krypt

💂London form

4 line stanzas (%%quatrains%%)

Regular rhyme scheme - **ABAB**

Simple - **childlike**, like a ballad/written for children

→ written as a **political** protest poem in a memorable way, so children can remember it

💂 I wonder through each chartered street

**chartered** (^^verb^^) =

→ ^^mapped^^ = streets are being expanded (urbanization destroying what was once natural)

→ everything in the city is owned and chartered out by King

**I wander** (%%contrast%%) =

→ %%we can still be free%% as long as we look at London in a different way

💂 the mind-forged manacles I hear

**mind, manacles** (==alliteration==) = ==memorable== (form)

**mind-forged manacles** (==metaphor==) = imagery of ==oppression==, incarceration, we are owned by something mind-**forged** = we have done this to ourself

→ idea of social hierarchy with king, nobility and rich is not necessarily real + a societal construct “forged” by everyone in London

**forged** (^^verb^^) = ^^to fake things^^

→ belief in the class system is a fake way of viewing the world to strip our “manacles” that prevent us being free in our own minds

💂 every blackening Church appals

**blackening Church** (==metaphor==) = coal ==smoke==, Church is ==corrupted== and a part of the social establishment, a part of “chartered” streets owned by the rich

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**appalls** (^^verb^^) =

→ ^^shocks^^, should be shocked at chimney sweepers (death from smoke), but the Church doesn’t care/try to improve society → attacking Church for its complacency

→ material cover over a ^^coffin^^, Church is wearing a pall = Church is becoming black = Church is ^^dead^^ + has turned away from Christ’s teaching → ^^no more religious authority or practice/belief^^

💂 runs in blood down Palace walls

@@AO3@@ = evolution in France is likely to happen in our own country; preaching warning that society is so corrupt that the poor will revolt + kill them to set up a new republic (like in France)

💂 the youthful Harlots curse

==metaphor== = concept of a woman's role as a prostitute, = outweighs her other roles (mother, daughter, wife) as a woman

→ cursed by the fact that she has no other choice but to be a whore

💂 and blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

**Marriage** (^^noun^^) = disagrees w/ inequality for women + believes ^^men^^ are killing off marriages (^^hearse = coffin^^)

**plague** (^^noun^^) = ^^STDs^^ (incurable)/

%%poem finishes w/ behaviour of men that treat women + marriage vows as inferior = men are corrupt, visit prostitutes = damages women (disease = physical and mental)%%

👰My Last Duchess form

%%monologue%%, spoken entirely by the Duke

→ no replies from witness = Duke’s self-importance

%%rhyming couplets%% = creating the allusion of wholeness, but power differential = different parts of couple (Duke > Duchess)

= Speech is heavily %%rehearsed%% = morally dubious speaker confessing/ reflecting on sinful actions → dangers of a patriarchal society (Browing is pointing out that men have too much power = corrupts + leads to murder)

👰 my last duchess

my (^^possessive pronoun^^) = power + assumed listener being addressed establishes both the possessive, sinister tone of the speaker

👰 that’s my last duchess painted on the wall,

**last** (^^adjective^^) = allusion to death, latest in list → married + executed more than one Duchess

**painted on the wall** = ^^fresco^^ (Pandolf worked on it for a day) = painted quickly, ^^urgent^^ → doesn’t decide to have her painted until he’s decided to have her killed = ^^artwork > Duchess^^ + desperate for her to die quickly = ^^vicious + callous^^

👰her looks went everywhere

**looks** (^^noun^^) = sought out praise + ^^flattery^^ from other men = sexual frustration, Duchess was amorous (looks meaning seeing)

the %%repeated%% %%motif%% of appearance (**looks, painting**) = women are valued by %%looks%% (looks meaning image)

**everywhere** (^^hyperbole^^) = extreme ^^possession^^ and ^^jealousy^^ of the Duke, absurdity, and unfathomable attitude

**went** (^^verb^^) = past → now she is a ^^painting^^ and cannot ^^escape^^ him

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a repeated theme of image = important as men had a high image in society and were superior to women

🌹 Poppies

written in chronological order, although the narrator's past and present emotions intermingle through grief.

free-verse + direct address makes the reader feel a part of the mother’s own memories and emotions. 

caesura = shows the woman’s attempts to hold in her emotions in front of her son, most memorably at “steeled the softening of my face” (All my words/ flattened, rolled, turned into felt)

🌹 spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade

of yellow bias binding around your blazer

paper red (imagery) = poppy, spasms is a semantic field of pain → her pain + foreshadows his pain in death (colour imagery of red as blood)/ indicate her own depressive emotions of saying goodbye

blockade (metaphor) = suggestive of war, emotions are blocking him going to war

🌹 blackthorns of your hair

thorns (imagery) = Jesus' crown of thorns → she is sacrificing him to the country

OR nature = purity

🌹 All my words/ flattened, rolled, turned into felt,

felt = soft, not sharp or direct

flattened = ruined, ignored

= not expressing her real emotions

🌹 slowly melting.

(metaphor) words dont have proper meaning, shape or substance

= melting into meaningless

🌹 the world overflowing like a treasure chest

positive = intoxication, foolishness, patriotism (juxtaposition)

suggests mother realizes she is freeing her son → sees new job opportunities

caesura = shows the woman’s attempts to hold in her emotions in front of her son, most memorably at “steeled the softening of my face”

As he leaves the adventure and glory that ‘treasure’ connotes his naïve perception of newfound freedom and his childlike excitement. For the mother, ‘overflowing’ signifies her inability to control her emotions anymore as he leaves.

🌹 I went into your bedroom, released a songbird from its cage

son = songbird

(metaphor) conveys how she is setting him free to be killed as songbirds are 'easy prey'. A symbol of peace, although it probably implies that his only peace is in dying.

‘cage’ (signifying his former domestic life) seems very constrictive and oppressive. Another interpretation of this metaphor is that the mother is releasing her emotions which she has bottled up as though they were caged.

leaned against it like a wishbone

(simile) represents the fragility of her mental state.

A wishbone’ is designed to give good luck, which contrasts the tragic foreshadowing of the previous stanza = emotion

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📸 War Photographer Form

starts off w/ trochaic meter (first syllable is stressed) - “in his dark room”

then swaps to iambic (changes rhythm) “with spools of”

→ unsettles us, we are puzzled

= Duffy’s purpose (to unsettle us)

→ cyclical structure as Duffy begins + ends w/ a varying trochaic and iambic rhythm = unsettles the reader + shows the continuously unsettling nature of war

📸 spools of suffering

sibilance = soft but sinister sound → what WP is doing is cruel (bystander, not interfering)

sibilance = 's' sounds mimic the sound of the shutters of the camera as they 'snap' to take the photos/burst of photos, so

the speed of the shots taken mirrors the emotionless attitude the photographer has towards death

📸 set out in ordered rows

semantic field of death = graveyard → mass barbarism of war

(central moral dilemma about conflict)

ordered = we cause war

📸 a priest preparing to intone a Mass

imagery = memorial creates a sense of how serious the photographer’s work is to him and to society more generally

plosive sound of ‘p’ = violence, relating to how the people died

metaphor/simile - priest = godly, ironic (recording death)

📸 all flesh is grass

biblical allusion (Isiah: 40) = insignificance of life during times of conflict, one death can mean very little → deaths don’t matter to perpetrators

flesh (noun) = not even referred to as people, dehumanizing evokes pathos in the listener

📸 fields which don’t explode beneath the feet \n of running children

heavy contrast between life in England and the war zone (“explode” and “running children”)

📸 how the blood stained into foreign dust

stained (verb) = permanence of the effects of war

foreign (adjective) = unfamiliar

📸 A hundred agonies in black and white

black and white (colour imagery) = limited, one-dimensional

→ propaganda as not everything is shown/censorship

→ forgotten

→ hyperbole = tyrannical extent of the barbarism of war

📸 prick / with tears between the bath + pre-lunch beers

rhythm = tone of joviality + enjoyment

→ readers should be feeling shocked + horror

verb (prick) = tiny, emotionless (bath washes out emotion)

= Modern people depend on the suffering of others but ignore + medicate themselves w/ “beers” so they don’t have to face their consciounces

🏝️ Storm on the Island Form

😱 Remains Form

monologue → begin ‘in media res’ in a conversation

present tense = continues to affect him

😱 on another occasion we got sent out

colloquial opening → “sent out” = belittles + nullifies, softens emotions

“on another occasion” = how often the soldier has had to deal with things like this, alludes to the idea that these events are ingrained in the narrators mind = effects of conflict

😱 I see every round as it rips through his life

shift from ‘we’ (collective responsibility to ‘i’ = accepting culpability

present tense of the verb "rips" = places the speaker + listener in the moment the violence occurs, further enhancing the horror + emphasising trauma (stays in his mind)

alliteration of “r” = highlight the brutality and graphic nature of war (disturbs flow of the poem)

“round” = circularity → memory keeps coming back to the narrator in a cyclical form

😱 One of my mates goes by

and tosses his guts…

“mates” = colloquial language + imagery → at the time it was socially acceptable + casual, reassuring himself

juxtaposition of “goes by” + “tosses his guts” = contrasting feelings, emphasises shocked at the horror being described

😱 End of story, except not really

volta → effects of conflict

😱 blood-shadow

imagery = war has stained + imprinted on his conscience and his memory → physical reminder of the violence that has taken place, but can also be seen as a psychological manifestation of the speaker's guilt

😱 walk right over it week after week

permanent trauma and guilt

⚔️ Bayonet Charge Form

asyndeton + enjambment = sense of breathlessness → mimics fear of soldier as he is running slows down (trapped in time, exposed)

first stanza is 8 lines, second is 7, final is 8 = no proper pattern

⚔️ Suddenly he awoke and was running- raw

/in raw-seamed hot khaki

in media res → war is like an unnatural awakening

real life = dream

repetition + enjambment of ‘raw’ = probably refers to his emotion (unable to feel anything other than the raw emotion of fear as he runs straight into battle)

homophone ‘raw’ = could reinforce the soldier's pain, or it could emphasize the soldier's inexperience and lack of preparation/barbaristic, brutal reality

his sweat heavy

shows how it is increasingly harder to fight once disillusioned and without patriotic motivation

bullets smacking the belly out of the air

onomatopoeia used to alarming effect. The air is personified, losing its breath to violent assault.

plosive explosion of ‘b’ → creates a tone of threat and volatility

comic image

a rifle as numb as a smashed arm

simile = rifle is useless (exposes Hughe’s contextual concern → war is futile, soldier is vulnerable)

“numb” = suppress feelings (comic image ^) → because of trying to hide fear/defiance to patriotism

the assonance of “lugged” and “numb” = slow-sounding use of the letter u

= urgency in mind juxtaposed with the slowness of moving (“lugged” = slowing him down)

in bewilderment then he almost stopped -

in what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations

was he the hand pointing that second?

volta → almost freezes the poem, a moment of reflection in the reader, are they a victim of propaganda by "the nations” like him?

hand pointing = reference to recruitment, ordered

cold clockwork of the stars and the nations

cold = unemotional

clockwork = he is merely a hand on a clock, a cog in the machine, exploited by much larger and more powerful forces (‘nations’)

= he is a part of a machine along thousands of soldiers

threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flame

🥶 Exposure Form

last line of each stanza is noticeably shorter and indented which emphasises its importance → are either **rhetorical questions** or the repetition of the phrase ‘But nothing happens’. Both have the effect of emphasising the apparent pointlessness of what is going on.

🥶 Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us/

“knife” = personification, depicts nature to be an enemy, accentuates their solitude and victimisation

🥶 But nothing happens.

poem’s stanzas end and begin in a cyclical manner with the short sentence and volta “But nothing happens”.

→ not only depicts solitude and senselessness of war but volta shows the lack of hope or resolution

🏙️ Emigree form

presents itself as a first person account of an emigree's relationship with her homeland

🏙️ There once was a country

“was” (past tense) = country no longer exists

🏙️ but my memory is still sunlight clear

motif of sunlight = warmth, joviality, comfort / hope

🏙️ it may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants

but i am branded by an impression of sunlight

sick = personification → relationship

repetition of volta (but) proceeded by sunlight = constant hope

branded = mark of ownership → overcome by her childhood memories, can’t escape past → nostalgia + poignancy (reader reflects on their own childhood) → negative verb, heat

Rumens ​juxtaposes​the ​positive connotations​of ​“sunlight”​ with the ​negative connotations​of ​“branded”​ in ​“But I am branded by the impression of sunlight”​. This shows how her love for her country will always overrule any feelings of pain caused by it.

🏙️ like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar

doll = memories aren’t real

hollow = memories weren’t a full perspective of the world

→ memories = false

😡 Checking out me history Form

😡 Dem tell me / Dem tell me

anaphora, assonance (e) = building up a rhythm

simple rhyme → for children, history taught in school (like London)

= we should treat all children + Caribbean children more diverse history + culture and less prejudiced

own dialect (Dem) = overcoming British society by acknowledging them in his own dialect

😡 Bandage up me eye

“bandage” = British society view his culture as damaging + fixable

therefore blind him

😡

😡

✈️ Kamikaze Form

✈️ her father embarked at sunrise

sunrise = divinity → meeting God / patriotism (sun on Japanese flag)

✈️ with a flask of water, a samurai sword

sibilance = tone of peace, reflects peace that soldier is calm w/ death

water = symbol of purity + Christian = baptism (heroism)

✈️ in a figure of eight

infinity = foreshadow him changing his mind (“first one way/then the other), repetitive loop

or = death is permanent

✈️ loose silver

biblical allusion to Judas → betrayed Jesus for silver

= loose morality + patriotism