War Poems Comparison

“Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words”. Here American poet Paul Engle manages to unveil the crux of poems underneath the stanzas, lines and technicalities- the emotions. The strength of the poem depends on the weaknesses portrayed by the poets’ personas because ultimately the easiest way to control one is to tug a little at their heartstrings. No one has conquered hearts with a gaudy show of strength. Hence, emotive language is a weapon of great effect if wielded correctly, which the poets of the six poems mentioned execute successfully.
Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘War Photographer’ illustrates the emotional suffering of a troubled war photographer as he’s alone ‘in his darkroom’ (a place of peace and tranquillity) reflecting upon the agony he has witnessed. The religious metaphor in the first stanza is especially effective because it compares the photographer to ‘a priest preparing to intone a Mass’. Relating to how he has to impart knowledge about the warzone victims similar to how a priest offers moral instructions or perhaps even prepares for a funeral mass to remember the deceased. From a different perception, the use of this religious imagery could be interpreted as the photographer’s confession and a plea for forgiveness for having taken such horrific pictures. Duffy has used this silent, emotional unravelling of the photographer to invoke the reader’s sense of pathos; we empathize with the photographer’s sacrifice of his morals for a greater cause.
No matter the context, when children are introduced in conjunction with pain and terror, the emotive value is taken to the next level. Duffy cleverly takes advantage of this, when she mentions the ‘fields ...

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...clusion, the readers will be able to relate to the feeling of loss as well as paternal/maternal instinct to protect your offspring, which is eternal through humanity and nature.
All these war poems have great emotional power represented by the poets as well as instilled in the reader. The poets effectively use these emotional triggers to open a flood of emotions which they then can use to manipulate the reader’s reaction to certain situations. Novelist Salman Rushdie sums up the purpose of poems with a quote, “a poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it going to sleep”. And this was ultimately what these poems have done; they manage to make the world aware of the atrocities of war through times, in addition to pushing us to keep our actions in check and refrain from such inhumane acts.