Duffy's Feelings in War Photographer and Stealing
Explain how Carol Ann Duffy conveys her feelings towards the subjects
of the two poems War Photographer and Stealing.
'War Photographer' and 'Stealing' by Carol Ann Duffy are both poems
about outsiders. She often uses dramatic monologues when writing
poems, and 'Stealing' is an effective example.
'War Photographer' was written after Duffy had a conversation with a
war photographer named Don McCullin. I believe that he must have
inspired her to write this laudable poem. 'Stealing' too is based on a
true event. When Duffy lived in Wimbledon her neighbours snowman was
stolen.
The setting of this poem is established on the first line; this being
in a 'dark room' where 'he is finally alone'. Because the setting is
away from the action of the war, it describes the results indirectly
so that it is less graphic, whereas 'Stealing' explores the psychology
of an anonymous outsider with anti-social behaviour and feelings. Like
'War Photographer', 'Stealing' is about someone who is isolated from
society and shows evidence of being distressed. However, in this poem,
the narrator is the character and he is angry and resentful.
In both of the poems she uses the expressions and speech rhythms of an
everyday conversation. 'Stealing' starts with a question, 'The most
unusual thing I ever stole?', which I think, makes the poem more
interesting and intriguing for the readers as well as making it more
conversational. The question is then answered with 'A snowman'. This
is quite a shocking and unusual thing to steal and I believe this will
grab the reader's interest. By making the poem more conversational, it
makes it more personal and gets us more intrigued and makes us think
about the unusual question at the start of the poem. This is effective
as it makes the poem feel more realistic to the readers and conveys
her feelings to the poem in a more personal manner.
Both of the poems are about anonymous people. In 'War Photographer'
the main character is identified as a man. Duffy portrays this man as
an outsider. She refers to him as a 'priest preparing to intone a
mass'. 'All flesh is grass' is another effective example of religious
imagery. I believe it means that there was so much death where he was
photographing that the grass was covered in bodies. It is also linked
to the Bible as it is said to mean 'walking on death'. The use of
religion in this poem has a strong link to Duffy as she is said to be
a Catholic. This makes the poem more personal as it shows that
In the aftermath of a comparatively minor misfortune, all parties concerned seem to be eager to direct the blame to someone or something else. It seems so easy to pin down one specific mistake that caused everything else to go wrong in an everyday situation. However, war is a vastly different story. War is ambiguous, an enormous and intangible event, and it cannot simply be blamed for the resulting deaths for which it is indirectly responsible. Tim O’Brien’s story, “In the Field,” illustrates whom the soldiers turn to with the massive burden of responsibility for a tragedy. The horrible circumstances of war transform all involved and tinge them with an absurd feeling of personal responsibility as they struggle to cope.
In the last stanza it is explained how, even when she was a child, she
...eath" a song, a secular, correlates to her thoughts. Repetition is of course, used in the song with a trace of syncopation in the first line "oh Death, oh Death, where is thy string." The oral tradition is unmistakably. The chapter then concludes with the song--- a cathartic release.
As we progress further into the poems, the different ways Duffy presents gender dominance becomes obvious. In LRC, Duffy develops the budding romantic relationship between the persona and the wolf, deviating from the original tale because the persona is a willing, complicit participant in her own seduction:
Dr. Moody reports, “Almost every person has expressed to me the thought that he is no longer afraid of death” (Moody Jr, MD, 2015, p. 90). Dr. Moody draws parallels between scripture, the philosopher Plato, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Emanuel Swedenborg. Scripture teaches us of Christ speaking to Paul and what body the dead will have. Christ
Bradstreet poems are full of hints on this belief of her. Anna herself mostly prized lengthy religious poem of the conventional plots belonging to her pen: the change of seasons, and so on, whereas most modern readers like her w...
her in his poetry and believed she was "the guide of his thoughts and emotions
Death is personified as having a grip. This makes sense because they are in danger of dying with very little possibility of escape.
The corpse mutilated and eaten by carrion-birds and by dogs" (Sophocles). Herein lies the dilemma; in Greek culture, the spirit of a body that is not buried by sundown on the day that it died cannot find rest but is doomed to walk the earth.
Thomas Higginson said that “the main quality of her poems is that of extraordinary grasp and insight, uttered with an uneven vigor, which was all her own'; (78).
I am going to compare and contrast the two poems ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen and ‘War Photographer’ by Carol Ann Duffy. They both give a view of war. Owen gives first hand experiences he witnessed whilst fighting in World War One and where he unfortunately died one week before the war came to an end. Carol Ann Duffy may be writing about the feelings of her personal friends who were war photographers, showing some of the horrors they witnessed.
life was a ransom, his death was a payment for our sins. As man sinned
The everyday objects present in his poems provide the reader an alternative perspective of the world. Robert Frost uses all the elements of poetry to describe the darker side of nature. After analyzing the Poem Mending Wall and After Apple Picking it is clear that nature plays a dark and destructive role for Robert Frost. This dark side of Frost’s poetry could have been inspired from the hard life he lived.
Wright turns his attention to the word “resurrection.” He explores the way ancient writers and thinkers have used the term. He writes: “The word resurrection in its Greek, Latin, or other equivalents was never used to mean life after death. Resurrection was used to denote new bodily life after whatever sort of life after death there might be” (p. 36). Resurrection meant bodies, yet modern writers have taken resurrection to be synonymous for “life after death” (p. 36). Wright then continues with the early Christian meaning of resurrection, even including seven mutations of the Jewish resurrection belief from which Christians derive their belief.