Comparison of war poems
In this essay I will be discussing two different war poems, all set and written during the Boer War. I will write about how they portray to us the pity of war and the messages that are within the poems and the way the poets have used their language whilst writing the poems. The two poems that I will be discussing are A Wife in London by Thomas Hardy and War by Edgar Wallace. However, we have also studied Dirge of the Dead Sisters by Rudyard Kipling and The Hyaenas by Rudyard Kipling.
Each poem is unique within its own context. A Wife in London describes the life of women in England during the Boer War in an implicit way. It shows the nervousness that was felt by the women who were eagerly waiting to hear news of their husbands. In this poem Thomas Hardy shows an ironic and grim joke played on people by Fate. It also shows the suffering of those during the war time, although they were thousands of miles away from the fighting itself. The poet of War, Edgar Wallace was an orderly when the war began.
His poem is set in a field hospital where a doctor and his orderly are doing their utmost best to treat casualties of the war. The poem describes the gruesome fate met by soldiers fighting on the front line and it also describes the unsightly scenes that were experienced by those who were helping the injured. The poem is particularly about an injured man who has been brought in with a deadly wound, a ricochet, that can not be treated. Rudyard Kipling who wrote both Dirge of the Dead Sisters and The Hyaenas was a very famous poet and novelist of his time and pretty much today also.
In Dirge of the Dead Sisters Kipling writes about the courage and endurance of the women that volunteered to help in the war. He praises their actions and shows them as caring nurses who were prepared to take on any task without giving a care for their own selves. In The Hyaenas Kipling writes about the unfortunate fate of the soldiers that are dead and buried. He talks about the scavenging Hyaenas that would come and uproot the bodies of these helpless humans and eat them lavishly, thriving on the dead meat. He does not blame them for doing this but rather it is their instincts and habit.
Instead he blames the people for defiling the dead man’s name and not the hyenas, who only seek to satiate their hunger and not disgrace anybody. All poems tell us about the war behind the scenes. They describe to us the things that are not told to those who are living at home. They tell us the things are kept hidden and ‘censored’ from the general public. They tell us emotional and dramatic experiences to the more horrific and gruesome experienced and seen only by those who were on the battlefield or who had contact with those in the war.
I will now give a detailed analysis of each poem together with evidence, using quotations from the poems. A Wife in London explores the hardship and suffering felt by those that were thousands of miles away from the fighting. It is set during the winter months, “sits in the tawny vapour”, a time when people are feeling gloomy and sad. There is a lot of strong imagery used within the poem to reflect the woman’s feelings and emotions. The metaphor of the fog shows that the woman is in complete darkness, both literally and in the sense that she is deeply saddened and grieved.
This use of scenery to reflect a person’s mood is called pathetic fallacy. Just as fog slowly fades away, it is as though this woman’s fears and sadness to will fade away. However, the woman’s hopes are dashed when the fog gets thicker in the next few lines. “Like a waning taper The street lamp glimmers cold. ” The waning street lamp shows that there is no chance of the fog clearing as the light slowly fades from sight because of the thickening fog. Similarly, the woman’s thoughts and hopes are getting more and more pessimistic until they too will become cold with sadness and grief.
But the fact that the street lamp is glimmering, it shows there is still hope for the woman. The next verse, “A messenger’s knock cracks smartly, Flashed news