English War Poetry - page 4
Keywords: With Detailed Reference to Any Four Poems from the Anthology You Have Studied, Explain the Way Different Poets Convey a Range of Aspects In war
By Riko V on 16/05/2007
Level: GCSE Key Stage 4 (Years 10-11)
Page Number: 4 of 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
was left of them,
Left of six hundred.’
The word left is repeated to reinforce the fact that the soldiers are all dead, all the soldiers have been ‘left’ in the ‘valley of death’ to rot, no military burial, and no honours service. This feeling is also expressed in the poem Drummer Hodge ‘They throw in Drummer Hodge to rest, Uncoffined-just as found.’ Thus showing the futile nature of war and the pointlessness of these young men losing their lives.
‘Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!
This is a final salute to the bravery of the men who lost their lives in the greatest of military blunders. This poem was popular with many soldiers as it recognised the ultimate sacrifice that they were prepared to make and it honoured them for it.
This poem shares much in common with the ‘Ode’ in its willingness to honour the soldiers for the sacrifice they made. But ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ is more ambiguous in its message; it does also express feelings about the futile nature of war.
‘The Man He Killed’, it was written by a man called Thomas Hardy at the time of the first Boer War (1880-1881). During this war the English fought the Dutch settlers in South Africa over diamond mining. Hardy, like Tennyson expresses the attitude that war is futile.
The poem begins with the persona imagining what things would have been like if he had met his enemy under different circumstances:
‘Had he and I but met,
By some old and ancient inn’
He concludes that if this were the case, they would have ‘wet right many a nipperkin!’, in other words they would have been friends. From the very first stanza Hardy prompts us to question an individual’s role in war. The fact that hardy uses the word ‘should’ instead of ‘would’ alerts immediately to the fact that he believes war to be pointless. This is unlike the poem ‘To Lucasta, Going to the Wars’.
In the second stanza, the persona stops imagining and thinks about the reality that he faces ‘But ranged as infantry’ he is part of a battle and must kill or be killed:
‘I shot him as he at me,
and killed him in his place.’
The persona then tries to think of a rational and logical reason for his actions:
‘I shot him dead because-,
Because he was my foe.’
By repeating the word ‘because’ the
Last 5 comments…
There have been no comments posted for this article, but you need to register if you want to be the first!