Compare And Contrast At The Bomb Testing Site

Told from the perspective of sentient grass, Carl Sandburg’s poem brings forth an almost eerie feeling of the perseverance of nature. Whilst humanity has been battling out wars ever since the dawn of time, rapidly increasing in both strength and resulting casualties, a subject further proven by the second poem, William E. Stafford’s At the Bomb Testing Site. How great of an impact has the presence of mankind had on a planet, otherwise so rich in life? Will we ultimately end up victims of our own destructive ways?

The two poems are similar in the way that they are both products of authors who has experienced war, or an ever-looming threat of war erupting. But whereas Sandburg has a quite direct approach towards his subject, Stafford has chosen

Stafford seems to have chosen his words with care, and that has in effect increased the magnitude of its content. A single word can have multiple layers of meaning, as is the case with history; is the lizard simply witnessing history, or is it in fact a witness to man making history; perfecting and growing the atomic bomb? Another prominent feature which Stafford has bestowed upon this lizard, is its human-like qualities, making it relatable to us. He can tell that in addition to being able to process thought, the lizard is both “tense” and “[he is] panting”, features hardly ever characterized by lizards, outside of animated

Grass was written and published in 1918, at the end of the first World War, and is heavily influenced by that. “[Piling] the bodies high” and “[shovelling] them under […]” portrays a vivid and gruesome picture of death on an unimaginable massive scale. At the Bomb Testing Site on the other hand, was published in 1960, at the peak of the test runs of the US atomic bomb, and is in turn heavily influenced by its context. The overhanging threat of imminent nuclear war is a general undertone of his poem, mostly set right at the beginning with its title.

Putting the two poems up against one another does, then, prove quite interesting. They are similar in the way that they both put shame to the history of man, and that they deal with war in the grandest sense of the word, but at the same time they completely differ in regards to what type of war is portrayed, due to the contextual situation surrounding the authors during their respective time periods. WW1 has since been viewed by many historians as the last “real war”; one fought in trenches and by man-to-man combat, a portrayal further confirmed by the sheer size of body piles portrayed by Sandburg in his