A Young Warrior Poem

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Language has always been the key to how humankind has interacted with each other, so it is only fitting that one of the oldest forms of expression is making written language an art form. Poetry is known to conjure images within our minds and speak to our soul in a profound way. The best poets can use a few lines to make one think and feel something inside on anything such as a political statement, or of the beauty of nature. An excellent example of a poet who made art out of written word is Poṉmuṭiyār in his A Young Warrior. The poem uses its content and form to provide the overall meaning that one should live in peace because life is short. On the surface, Poṉmuṭiyār writes the poem almost as if it is a short story where the speaker mourns for a young man who once afraid of violence grew up living off of it only to die young. The speaker sets a tone of mourning from the first line that states, “O heart sorrowing for the lad.” The tone is maintained all the way to the end when it says he died his beard still soft meaning he was only a teenager giving the impression that it is saying it is a shame the man died as young as he did. The …show more content…

The poem shows that the young man grows up to become a fighter who does not know when to stop all in the matter of a few lines that amount to one sentence. Then in an even shorter sentence, he dies in combat. Writing this as two sentences accentuates the idea that life is short, but can even be shorter if we can not get along. The speaker’s mourning tone probably ponders if the man avoided fighting maybe he could have lived longer as suggested when mentioning killing war elephants were not enough for the man who immersed himself in the battleground. By putting oneself in an environment of anger and aggression to the point of a questionable noticing of an arrow inside of oneself can only lead to a shortened

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