Dulce et Decorum Est/Summary/ Theme

Wilfred Owen had considerable first-hand experience of the horrors of gas warfare during World War I, and his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” is an attempt to depict the helplessness of men caught in a gas attack. Writing in four irregular verse paragraphs, Owen describes the general condition of men involved in the war, sketches briefly the shock of a gas attack, then dwells on the aftermath of this tragic event on someone who lives through it.

Although it is often unwise to associate the narrator of a poem with its author, it is quite likely that in “Dulce et Decorum Est” Owen is speaking in his own voice. His method of direct address to the reader makes his appeal in the final lines especially compelling.

Owen opens the poem with a description of a group of demoralized soldiers retreating from the front lines of the battlefield. The men are clearly fatigued (“Men marched asleep,” the narrator observes), so worn down that they are “deaf even to the hoots/ Of gas-shells dropping softly behind” (lines 7–8). Then, suddenly, someone shouts “Gas! GAS!” (line 9), and the men go into an “ecstasy of fumbling” (line 9) to put on masks before the deadly poison can take their lives. All but one are successful; the narrator looks out from behind the glass of his protective mask into the “green sea” (line 14) that the gas has created around him and his comrades, watching helplessly as one of his fellow soldiers dies in agony.

The image of that dying soldier is one that can never leave the narrator. As readers learn in the two lines set off from the rest of the text, the sight of that dying comrade haunts the narrator’s dreams, as the soldier “plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (line 16).

That memory prompts the narrator to offer in the final verse paragraph some bitter advice to readers about the nature of warfare and the outcome of blind patriotism. In the last twelve lines of the poem, Owen describes his experience of walking behind the wagon in which the dead man has been placed, seeing the corpse frozen in the twisted agony of its death throes. That sight, he says, would prevent any man from adopting glibly the notion that dying for one’s country is somehow noble.

Forms and Devices

What most readers notice immediately when reading “Dulce et Decorum Est” is the vividness of Owen’s imagery? The poet is able to make the horrors of warfare come alive before readers’ eyes. Some of those images are expressed in carefully chosen metaphors; others are simply presented in graphic language that describes the scene as the narrator sees it or remembers it.

Owen frequently collapses two activities into a single image, thereby heightening the reader’s awareness of the agony of the soldiers he describes. For example, in the opening lines, he captures the frustration of the men as they move across the battlefield in a single phrase; “we cursed through sludge” (line 2) suggests the simultaneous activities of moving forward while uttering a continuous stream of obscenities about their fate. To describe the difficulty of some of his comrades who no longer have boots to wear but who must go on about their duties, he says, “[w]e limped on, blood-shod”—graphically depicting the condition of the men’s feet by a single compound adjective that captures both the sight and the feeling of this situation. Other examples of such vivid language abound: Owen describes the memory of the man who dies of gas poisoning with such phrases as “the white eyes writhing in his face” (line 19), “the blood/ Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” (lines 21–22). The comparisons, too, are intended to reinforce in readers the sense of frustration and horror these soldiers feel. Owen describes them as being “like old beggars under sacks” (line 1). He characterizes his dying comrade-in-arms as “flound’ring like a man in fire or lime” (line 12); and in his dreams he sees the dead soldier’s face looking “like a devil’s sick of sin” (line 20)—certainly one of the most horrific renditions of distortion and disgust one might imagine.

All of these images are intended to contrast with the Latin maxim from which the poem’s title is taken: “Dulce et decorum est,” that is, “it is sweet and proper,” to undergo the agonies of disfigurement and death in the name of patriotism. Owen’s bitter indictment of this philosophy comes through in the words he chooses to depict the death of his fellow soldier.

Themes and Meanings

The major theme of “Dulce et Decorum Est” is associated with its Latin title, which is taken from a work by the poet Horace (65–8 b.c.). The full phrase (which Owen uses to close his poem) is dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, which can be loosely translated, “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” Owen consciously works to undermine this noble statement of patriotism by showing the ignominy of death in modern war.

The reader who has some knowledge of classical literature, especially epic poetry and the heroic odes which celebrate great warriors who fall in battle while serving their nation, will immediately see Owen’s strategy. The men he describes in this war are anything but noble. Instead of confronting their foes in single combat, the soldiers in Owen’s poem are retreating from the front lines. They are tired, both physically and psychologically. They are almost deaf to the sounds of the falling gas bombs that could take their lives at any moment.

Unlike the heroes of earlier wars, these soldiers do not face death at the hands of a recognizable enemy who bests them with sword or spear. Instead, death comes from afar; worse still, it comes impersonally in the form of an insidious poison that snuffs out life in a brief instant of agony (which Owen contrasts subtly with the “ecstasy of fumbling” [line 9] that occurs when the men try to put on their masks). These soldiers utter no death-bed speeches, as did their classical counterparts whom Horace and earlier poets celebrated. Instead, the only sounds emitted by those under gas attack are incoherent yells and—after death—a “gargling” from “froth-corrupted lungs” that occurs as the corpse of the soldier too slow to put on his mask in time is carted off to burial.

Owen served as a lieutenant in the British Army during World War I; ironically, he was killed shortly before the armistice was signed. Having grown up in England at the end of the nineteenth century, Owen would have come to the war imbued with a sense of patriotism, as the British had gone to great lengths to convince themselves that they were engaging in a noble conflict to save humankind. The graphic realities of the battlefield did not match the glorious descriptions of war prevalent in the literature Owen and his educated officer comrades had read. There was no glory in dying from gas poisoning. What Owen seems to have realized is that death by gassing was a metaphor for all death in modern warfare; the notion of a glorious death was simply a lie. “Dulce et Decorum Est” graphically depicts a central irony of death on the modern battlefield: No matter how noble the cause may be, the individual soldier can expect nothing but misery in combat and an ignominious end should he be unfortunate enough to become a casualty.

Bibliography

Griffith, George V. “Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est.’” Explicator 41, no. 3 (1983): 37-39. Provides a detailed reading of the poem, with an emphasis on images of voice. Griffith argues that “Dulce et Decorum Est” is as much a poem about poetry as it is about “the pity of war.”

Hibberd, Dominic. Owen the Poet. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1986. An illuminating study of Owen’s “poethood” based primarily on careful readings of the poems, including “Dulce et Decorum Est.”

Owen, Wilfred. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Edited with an introduction and notes by C. Day Lewis. New York: New Directions, 1964. The definitive edition of Owen’s poetry includes juvenilia, notes concerning manuscript variants, and two essential essays by accomplished poets. Also includes a memoir by Edmund Blunden.

Stallworthy, Jon. Wilfred Owen. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. This definitive biography sheds valuable light on the context and occasion of “Dulce et Decorum Est.”

Welland, Dennis. Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study. Rev. ed. London: Chatto and Windus, 1978. In this first and perhaps most influential study of Owen’s poetry, Welland argues that “Dulce et Decorum Est,” though masterly, is inferior to later, less strident poems such as “The Sentry.”

 

 

 

 

 

Critical Evaluation:

Wilfred Owen set his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” during World War I on the Western Front in France. His purpose—to protest against the mentality that perpetuates war—is unmistakable, but what sets the work apart from much other antiwar literature is the effectiveness of his tightly controlled depiction of war.

The first fourteen of the poem’s twenty-eight lines comprise a sonnet that vividly describes a single terrible moment. The last twelve address the reader directly, explaining the significance or moral of the incident. The speaker is among a company of exhausted men who after a stint at the front are marching unsteadily toward the rear when they are suddenly overtaken by poison gas. After they hastily pull on their gas masks, the speaker sees through the misty lenses that one of them, somehow maskless, is staggering helplessly toward him. He watches the man succumb to the gas, desperately groping the air between them as he drops to the ground, like someone drowning. The third stanza shifts the context to the speaker’s dreams. In a single couplet, the speaker declares that in all his dreams he sees that soldier plunging toward him. In the final stanza, he turns to the readers, telling them that if they too could have experienced such dreams and watched the soldier dying on the wagon into which the soldiers flung him, they would never repeat to their children “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori.”

Throughout the war, this Latin phrase—a quotation from the Roman poet Horace (Odes III. 2.13, 23 and 13 b.c.e.)—was frequently used in inspirational poems and essays. In a letter to his mother, Owen provides the translation, “It is sweet and meet to die for one’s country,” and he expostulates sarcastically, “Sweet! And decorous!”

Wilfred Owen is often judged to be the most remarkable of the group of “war poets” who emerged during World War I. Although “Dulce et Decorum Est” is seldom considered to be technically Owen’s finest poem, it is nevertheless among his most famous because it captures so compellingly not only the tribulations of the soldiers who fought in the war but also their belief that the patriotic rhetoric on the home front and the government’s refusal to negotiate a peace were more to blame for their suffering than the opposing soldiers. Owen, who was an officer with the Manchester Regiment, planned to publish “Dulce et Decorum Est” in a volume that was to present the truth about the war, which he knew to be utterly at odds with the belligerent cant that appeared daily in newspapers and magazines in England.

Two drafts of the poem carry the dedication “To Jessie Pope etc” (two other drafts simply say “To a certain Poetess”), suggesting that Owen had originally specifically targeted such individuals as Jessie Pope, whose collection of children’s verses, Simple Rhymes for Stirring Times, was intended to kindle enthusiasm for the war.

In the end, Owen removed the sarcastic dedication, perhaps so as to make clear that he wished to address a much broader readership. Most English men and women had greeted the outbreak of war in August, 1914, with enthusiasm. Wars of recent memory had been limited, distant affairs; the people expected adventure and heroism from a contained conflict that would be over by Christmas. Instead, after the second month of the war, when Germany’s march on Paris was halted at the Marne, the opposing armies dug themselves into trenches facing each other across a narrow strip known as “No Man’s Land” along a line that stretched across Belgium and France. In part because of the efficiency of machine guns and because tanks were not deployed until near the end of the war, neither side was able to dislodge the other. Millions of men lost their lives in costly and fruitless attempts to break the stalemate; in just one day, July 1, 1916, the great offensive at the River Somme took the lives of 60,000 men. Rats, lice, and the sight of exposed corpses were inescapable conditions of trench warfare. By the time the war ended, all those who had experienced the horrors of trench warfare had been forced to abandon their belief in the superiority of European civilization and the idea of European progress.

In the opening lines of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen vividly portrays the price of trench warfare, the exhaustion of soldiers who have become like old women, “hags,” coughing, lame, blind, and deaf. The poet speaks for these individuals who, though they no longer function in tidy military unison, are joined by their shared experience of a nightmare that seems just at the point of being over when the new assault arrives. The deadly gases (at first chlorine, later phosgene and mustard gas) that remain a hallmark of World War I, were first used on a large scale on the Western Front. Although soldiers were equipped with respirator masks, more than one million men died from such attacks. The gas whose effects Owen describes in the second stanza is the odorless and colorless mustard gas that was frequently used after July, 1917. Detectable only by its sting, it gave its victims only seconds to protect themselves and caused severe, often fatal, burns to exposed skin and lungs. Owen also mentions other miseries of the “Great War” such as the unusually heavy rainfalls that turned the fighting zone into a bog in which the men suffered crippling foot ailments and sometimes even drowned.

The poem also expresses “the pity of war,” the theme Owen also articulated in the short preface he drafted for the intended collection. English poetry, he explains, is “not yet fit to speak” of heroes, but speaking the truth of war may act as a warning to the next generation. Owen uses the word “pity” in a special sense, one that encompasses a profound fellow feeling for all those who suffer; and, ultimately, that includes everyone. Hence, his protest against war transcends itself and becomes a protest against all inhumanity. The ability of Owen’s poems to transcend the particular circumstances of their creation was a quality some of his early critics, including the poet W. B. Yeats, failed to see. “Dulce et Decorum Est” accomplishes this as effectively as anything Owen wrote, for the focus of its protest is not the pain suffered by a few men but rather the transhistorical “Lie.” The horrible death of the gassed soldier exposes the fallacy behind the oft-repeated, high-sounding Latin epigram: The poem’s protest is against an abuse of language.

Owen drafted the poem in August, 1917, at the age of twenty-four, while he was convalescing at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. He finished it about one year later, perhaps shortly before his death. The event described in the poem is almost certainly based on actual experience, as Owen reported such “smothering” dreams to his doctor. Recovering from concussion, trench fever, and “shell shock” or “neurasthenia” (terms that were often used as euphemisms for exhaustion), Owen’s stay at Craiglockhart was crucial in his poetic development, in part because he became acquainted with the more experienced soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon but, even more important, because it gave him a chance to work steadily during a period when his sense of poetic purpose was most urgent.

Owen was deeply concerned about the technical problems involved in the expression of his passionate convictions. Some of his later poems use striking methods such as half-rhyme, but in this poem too, Owen’s technical mastery is impressive. The first stanza employs heavy, single-syllable rhymes throughout; to convey exhaustion, Owen breaks up the rhythm, which only composes itself in the third line. After several comparatively regular lines, a dramatic shift occurs with the fragmentary syntax of the first lines of the stanza about the gas. The four repeating “um” sounds of those line in the words “fumbling,” “clumsy,” “someone,” “stumbling” produce interior rhymes that create a sudden, panicked sense of double-time. After the ellipsis, an eerie, dreamlike calm sets in as the poet coolly, objectively describes the man drowning “as in a green sea.” The couplet literally rehearses the moment as do the dreams, and in place of a rhyme it repeats the falling cadence of “drowning” with extraordinary effect, as though poetry itself must stumble and fall at this juncture. The final stanza exploits the steady, relentless rhythm of iambic pentameter for the purpose of “accumulatio,” heaping up declarations in couplets that each describe more of what could be seen. “My friend” announces a last turn: a direct accusation against the time-honored, respectable, capitalized “Lie.” The extra foot in line 25 shatters the iambic pentameter and produces particularly heavy stresses on the two long syllables of “old Lie,” enhancing the resonance of the foreshortened half-line that ends the poem.

In a late revision, Owen substituted lines 23 and 24 (“Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/ Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—”) for two lines that had introduced a note of eroticism that might have distracted attention from Owen’s main purpose (“And think how, once, his head was like a bud,/ Fresh as a country rose, and keen, and young,—”) The new lines recall images from Dante’s Inferno (c. 1320), and their guttural sounds enhance the impression of outrage.

After a year of convalescence, Owen returned to the front in August, 1918. In October, he received the Military Cross, and on November 4, 1918, just one week before the Armistice, he was gunned down on the Sambre Canal. Owen published only five poems during his lifetime, and “Dulce et Decorum Est” was first published posthumously in Poems (1920), the eleventh poem in a volume of only twenty-three. His reputation grew rapidly after the publication of Edmund Blunden’s 1931 edition of his poems, which included a lengthy memoir. Although the C. Day Lewis edition of Owen’s poems is now considered standard, “Dulce et Decorum Est” is often reprinted in versions that differ significantly. In particular, some editors follow Blunden in preferring a manuscript variant of line 8, “Of gas shells dropping softly behind.”

Toyota Altis

Toyota-Astra Motor introduced the Corolla which facelift now comes with a new name Grand New Corolla Altis because of the large changes that occur. This launch also spelled out in Europe faster because only a few weeks ago.

The biggest changes occurred in the sector that is driving the engine and transmission. Toyota Corolla Altis now apply the dual VVT-i technology on the 1.8-liter engine (2ZR-FE) complement the existing similar technology in the 2.0 liter engine (3ZR-FE). Dual VVT-i set the valve opening and inhaust exhaust are computerized.

Whereas in the present transmission system using Super CVT-i with a seven-speed Sequential Sport Shift. This transmission offers refinement, silently and contribute to improving fuel efficiency. Equipped with Sequential Shift, so the driver can still play the transmission lever to pursue the pleasure of driving. Another option, new gearbox 6 MT.

Combination of these two new technologies that help increase fuel efficiency up to 7% plus extra comfort. Other additional devices in the car is equipped with Toyota’s new entertainment Navigation

In terms of exterior changes visible on the front bumper, headlights, rear combination lamps, alloy wheels, rear bumper, new design optitron meter, 3 spokes steering wheel, driving eco indicator and other changes.

Grand New Corolla Altis 2.0V so worth USD 380 million. 8.1 Type G to be USD 349.7 million and the new type E 08.01 USD 328 million.

The War Against the Trees/Summary/Theme

Stanza 1: The poem opens with a man and his neighbors watching bulldozers tear up the man’s lawn. The man is joking with the neighbors, and the event is referred to as a “show.” The man’s upbeat behavior suggests that he has sold the land for a good price. “Branchy sky” indicates that this parcel of “lawn” has quite a few trees on it, as the branches seem as much a part of the sky as of the tree. Contributing to the carnival-like atmosphere is the personification of the bulldozers as sloppy males on a date, who, “drunk with gasoline,” force themselves on the woman, as they test the “virtue of the soil.” This last phrase is also ironic since the bulldozers are not concerned with the soil’s quality, as farmers are, but with what lies beneath the soil.

Stanza 2: Stanza two begins full mobilization of the language of war (“forays” and “raids”). The bulldozers- as-tanks, having taken out what would be the first line of defense, the privet-row, now take out the second line—forsythias and hydrangeas. But the real “enemy” lies ahead. Bulldozers head for the hard-to-root-out trees, analogous to a nest of machine guns protected by lines of surrounding troops. The trees themselves are monuments of a civilization, and every time an elm fell “a century went down.” In a familiar metaphor the trees are also likened to human bodies, as they are described as having been “lopped and maimed.” This is akin to the trees’ beheading, or the hacking of limbs from their torsos (trunk), an occurrence in humanto- human war. The offensiveness of the acts is heightened because the trees are humanized, referred to as the “great-grandfathers of the town.”

Stanza 3: The war continues as bulldozers and Caterpillars (“hireling engines”) dig up tree after tree. The limbs and tops have already been hacked away and the roots are the last to go. The speaker remarks that undermining the trees also destroys the habitat of soil grubs and moles, a destruction of beings and ecology. Then, as in the previous stanza, trees are again linked to humans: they are kings when standing (they have “crowns”), and subservient subjects when felled (on their “knees,” as if begging). The final personification is the death throes or tremblings the trees suffer before dying, their “seizures.” That is, their leafy tops (“northern”) can be seen to shake before the trees topple and fall.

Stanza 4: From the effect of bulldozers on trees and land, Kunitz now moves to the larger picture affected by both the presence and absence of trees. He imagines children of the past (“ghosts”) playing in the trees’ shade, growing up alongside the trees. The poet also imagines nature (“the green world”) with a book, perhaps its own biography or photo album, turning another worn (“foxed”) page, perhaps reading about or viewing another slaughter in its own history. At stanza’s end, the children disappear into “their grievous age,” which could indicate either crippling old age and death or the era in which the children live, the 1950s, when suburban developments flourished. The word “suburbs,” short for suburban, indicates a kind of environment where trees are cut down and substituted with housing developments. It can also represent a place where people sometimes grow “grievously” into old age because they become isolated and preoccupied only with raising children and maintaining property. This is the suburbs as the breeding place of sameness and mediocrity, to some, a living death.

Stanza 5: In the last stanza, the trees are down and uprooted, leaving behind craters “too big for hearts,” the phrase pointing to the inability of humans to love, care, or protect trees. From being maimed in root and branch, the killing field is now complete— roots are now “amputated” from the soil, exposed for all to see. The poet compares the huge snarls of roots to gorgons, mythological female creatures with snakes for hair who turned those looking at them into stone.

With this vision of a pock-marked landscape, the poet imagines the cornered lot as a cratered moon, a dead landscape. But others do not necessarily see the scene as the poet does. They see it like the joking neighbor at the beginning, or like drivers glancing for a “witness-moment” in their rearview mirrors, giving the scene no more than a passing or backward glance on their way to other scenes and concerns more important, or more subject to their control. By the final line and word, the poem has come full circle: from producers of oil (Standard Oil) clearing the land at the beginning of the poem, to consumers of oil driving over cleared and paved land at poem’s end. For only a moment, drivers might have the opportunity to link their own practice to the unsightly mess on the corner lot.

 

Themes of Life and Death

Kunitz was born in the industrial town of Worchester, Massachusetts in 1905. He was raised by his mother; his father had died before his birth. He was subjected to anti-Semitism as a youth. (Worchester is built on seven hills, each of which was inhabited by a different ethnic group. At that time these groups remained apart and oftentimes were antagonistic to the others.) In an interview with Leslie Kelen he said, “I was curious about the world of possibilities beyond those other alien hills (in Worchester).” Later in another interview he said, “In my youth, as might be expected, I had little knowledge of the world to draw on. But I had fallen in love with language and was excited by ideas.” To Leslie Kelen he also remarked, “I’m not a nature poet, but I am a poet of the natural world.” Kunitz’s five stanza poem reveals his love of nature and shows his fascination with special forms of language in order to present his ideas. The poem takes a look at the modern world’s relentless quest for oil at the expense of the environment. In it, the narrator stands to the side and watches and comments on the changes occurring before him.

In Touch Melt, published in 1995 in The Later Poems: New and Selected, the question is asked, “What makes the engine go?” The answer is: “Desire, desire, desire.” It is “desire” for oil-consuming machines that pushes the oil company to seek more sources of oil. A new and “grievous age” makes unquenchable and immediate demands for more oil. The consequence of this desire is that the future has become dependent on oil, just as the past has been. And so to satisfy the future, the present now destroys the past.

Kunitz once said, “I know … that I am living and dying at once.” This acceptance of life and death simultaneously is a major theme in his poetry. In this poem the theme of death in life is reintroduced as the theme of past and future. The future informs the past, just as the past determines the future. In Kunitz’s poem the future will destroy the past upon which it will be built. As the bulldozers and other machines test “the virtue of the soil” and remove the greenery, they leave a cratered moon-like world. The forsythia, hydrangeas, and privet hedge all fall to the power of the machines, as one part of the natural world is uprooted and destroyed in order to find another. With the felling of each “great-grandfather” the link between the past and the future is reduced. The ancient trees, representatives of the past, yield to the machines that now bring them “to their knees.”

Ironically, this attack on trees is also an attack on the primal origin of oil itself: the prehistoric accumulation of forest material which under pressure and over time is turned into oil. These trees would not be turned into oil, but they are descendants of those trees from ages past. The oil is used by the past-driven machine to destroy the present-day trees to gain access to more prehistoric oil deposits that will be needed to fuel future machines in their quest for more oil! And the cycle continues without end. In this search for oil the needs of the future destroy two pasts: the oil itself and the memories of the past. The cycle brings to mind the ancient imagery of a snake eating its own tail until nothing exists except the memory of the snake. But in this poem, even the memory disappears.

In the headlong quest for new sources, the oilseeking Standard Oil Company attacks the landscape, laying low everything in its path. This is the environmental equivalent to General Sherman’s march to the sea during the American Civil War and it is reported using warlike imagery and phrases. The attack on the “lawn” and the neighborhood soil is as frantic as the children’s games. This event brings to mind the phrase often repeated during the Vietnam war: We had to destroy the village, in order to save it. In this poem, the neighborhood is destroyed in order to provide it with the oil it will need in order to survive in the oil-dependant future. The image left on that “corner lot” is one fleeting rearview mirror glimpse, the “witness-moment” of the cratered moonscape (a bombed landscape image) disappearing into the distance.

The ghostly images of playing children soon disappear because those memories depend on the existence of the old trees under which they played their games “in the shade.” The children’s frantic play, as they go “racing beyond their childhood” into a future of their own, is replaced by the frantic destruction of the gasoline-drunken machines as they charge into their own future. But each enters a different future. The children, who played in the past, enter a future which is the present for the narrator. The bulldozers, which work in the present, move into an unknown future. The narrator stands in the present, examining the past as it moves into the future—a paradox of the past, present and future all occurring at once.

An important poetic construction comes into play in the poem: the use of hyphenated words. In each stanza Kunitz uses a specially crafted word to create new meanings. “Forsythia-forays and hydrangea- raids” in stanza two create new images of plants and flowers with the war being waged on them by the machines. These new words combine the tender innocence of flowering shrubs with the brutality of war. The word “witness-moment” combines the instant of glancing into a rear-view mirror with the intensity of witnessing an event. It is more than just a casual seeing of the event because to witness carries a stronger involvement with it. It means to attest or to affirm an event to be true.

In the fourth stanza, “death-foxed” is Kunitz’s manufactured word that combines several meanings into one. An old meaning for “foxed” is intoxicated. Another correlation with the word deathfoxed is the old word death-bird, a carrion eater. The combination of these meanings at this point creates a new meaning: being intoxicated with the death of the “green world” in the recently devoured neighborhood.

The passing moment of defoliation is also witnessed by others. Some see it through the rear-view mirrors of their gasoline consuming cars. In the fleeting “witness-moment” the driver sees the past, literally the scenery behind him, but continues on the road to the future. In so doing the driver fulfills his part in the course of events according to Picard as the road ahead, his future, soon becomes the road in the mirror, his past.

The red wagon, a non-oil-dependent vehicle, is important to the narrator, because it combines the images of cheerful child’s play and the non-oildependant children (as in Kunitz’s youth). But these are soon replaced by the oil-powered machines that eat at the greenery of the neighborhood and the automobiles that carry witnesses past it.

The machines wage their impersonal war and bring the tree “giants to their knees.” There are no people are involved in the attacks. Only machines attack the trees and only the trees suffer from the attack. The implication that the machines have taken over the world in an insatiable attempt to quench their thirst for oil products is conveyed by the narrator’s inaction. The humans (the narrator and the watching neighbors) are passive observers. The drivers of passing cars are also detached as they witness the events as a reflected image in a rear-view mirror.

The boldly stated environmental concern addressed in this poem is especially poignant because it was published in 1958 (in Selected Poems, 1928–1958 ), when environmentalism was a littleknown concept. The result of his far-reaching vision is this well-crafted little poem. The “intellectual courage that insists on the truth” as he saw it allowed him to raise the issues in his poem. “If I hadn’t had an urgent impulse, if the poem didn’t seem to me terribly important,” Kunitz said, “I never wanted to write it and didn’t.” Kunitz grappled with images that have become all too commonplace. But many trees and landscapes have been sacrificed since this poem first appeared. He once revealed in the New York Times: “The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that dialogue. It is a rather terrifying thought that is at the root of much of my poetry.” That combination of life and death, as present and past, is at the heart of this poem.

Source: Carl Mowery, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2001. Mowery holds a Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, in Rhetoric and Composition and American Literature. He has written numerous essays for the Gale Group.

Complexity of Word Choice

In the following essay, the author examines Kunitz’s “The War Against the Trees,” paying close attention to the complexity of the poet’s word choice.

“The War Against the Trees” appears in several popular classroom anthologies of poetry, yet little about the poem exists in the biographical literature about Kunitz, or in the substantial criticism focused on his Selected Poems (1958), the volume in which “The War Against the Trees” appears. Perhaps this is because the poem seems self-evident. Or, from a different angle, so fragile that vigorous investigation would “break” it. While these arguments are not without their virtues (as is true for many poems), “The War Against the Trees” is neither so simple that deeper analysis cannot reveal its complexity, nor so fragile it cannot be shaken up without shattering its message. A close reading of the poem, with special attention paid to Kunitz’s word choice, will help to unpack its complexity.

In the first line of “The War Against the Trees,” “standard oil,” a proper noun, is not capitalized. The effect is to diminish the company’s real value, the poet, careful to avoid showing respect for a company bulldozing a parcel of land home to trees, flowers, and a vibrant underground ecology. The man who has sold the corner property is, Kunitz writes, “joking” with others watching the “show.” “Laughed” is not employed because the word would seem a direct response to the “show,” and would connote direct joy in the destruction, a kind of sadism. “Joking,” however, indicates a response less evil, an unconcern about, or ignorance of, the fuller meanings of this destruction. To these neighbors (or at least the man who sold the property), it is as if these trees and flowers were inanimate objects or mere things. This is not bloodsport, but a celebration of action, of noise and movement of bulldozers, the crash of big trees. The tone of this “celebration” is underscored by the description of the bulldozers, which are “drunk with gasoline.” Drunkenness personifies these machines, possibly prompting readers to think of drunken males in cars on a destructive spree, and then to bring readers back to the watching neighbors—are they drunk as well? Whatever the case, these neighbors would likely have been just as satisfied having attended a demolition derby or monster truck rally. This is a scene no one except the poet understands as a killing field. Instead, this seems a harmless arena to an audience as oblivious to the killing as are the bulldozers.

In “The War Against the Trees,” personification works both ways—to vilify and dignify. In the second stanza, personification is employed not only to vilify bulldozers, but to dignify plants. Kunitz casts the plants as under attack by the bulldozersas- tanks. Unfortunately, the metaphor begins to backfire if taking tall trees seems like taking an enemy bunker of big guns or missile launchers. But Kunitz prevents such thoughts from proceeding when he calls the trees “great-grandfathers,” “lopped and maimed.” This directs the comparison away from trees as enemies to trees as human-like victims, especially through the attribute of having severed limbs. Bulldozers represented as cars full of drunk males or tanks, and trees characterized as old men with severed limbs not only portrays this happening as an unfair fight, but as a destruction of the past (grandfathers) by the present (youth), a theme revisited in the poem’s fourth stanza.

The third stanza’s “hireling engines,” might conjure up an image of mercenaries (a further personification of bulldozers) hired by Standard Oil to “pacify” the site, eradicate from this corner lot any obstacles to development making it “safe” for business. “Hacking” is a verb describing a repulsive act, building empathy for the trees by casting them as living victims. Kunitz’s sensitivity extends not only to plants, but to what are usually disliked and unconsidered ground-dwellers, moles and grubs. Kunitz, however, dignifies the moles as human, as possessors of homes with “halls” under attack from humans and their machines. Grubs are exalted by having “dominions” making it not just grub homes suffering an attack, but grub communities and lands. From the ground’s smallest and most hidden creatures, Kunitz fast cuts to the largest and sometimes most visible, the “giants” of the sky: trees. These giant grandfathers, king-or queen-like with their crowns, are now humbled, forced to their “knees” in submission to the new, self-crowned kings of the wood, humans. This exaltation of plants and “lower” animals is the kind of sensibility describable as biophilia, care for all that lives. Kunitz, however, goes further by dignifying plants and animals, and, at the same time, vilifying humans. Or more precisely, vilifying a specified set of human actions.

If personification is Kunitz’s tool to enliven and vilify machines, and, in addition, extra-enliven and dignify nature, a rather opposite technique is employed on people, one depicting them as not fully alive. If, in the first stanza, the neighbors can be said to be “dead” to the import of the events in front of them, the fourth stanza is inhabited by the “ghosts of children.” The word “shade” enhances the real and figurative deaths in this scene. Shade describes not only the shade of trees but, in a long literary tradition, the state of a person after death, as in the phrase describing the afterworld, “land of the shades.” Children playing in the shade of trees, “racing beyond their childhood,” says Kunitz, disappear into “grievous old age,” die and become shades. Kunitz seems to say that an absence of treeshade— which describes many a sparsely-arbored, fifties suburb—hastens people into the “suburbs” of human old age, and finally, the “suburbs” of death (life as urban), a final move to the land of shades. Such a claim might be explained this way: eradication of trees and plants helps kill off memories of what was, pushes humans increasingly into hope for an unknown and suspect future, hastens time and therefore, the approach of death. Nostalgia and cognizance, on the other hand, work to slow time, to make aging less grievous, less, if you will, suburban. “Suburbs,” then, not only describes a place outside the “urb(an),” but a purgatory on the edge of life, an anteroom to the land of the shades.

In stanza four, “the green world,” or nature, is again personified—nature turns the page of an old book, its own biography. Nature has a long tradition of comparison to a book, one that with the Book of God comprised the two-volume set of the Book of Life. Nature turning the pages of its own book is a kind of objectification (nature as book), personification, and deification (nature as a kind of god or demiurge) rolled into one. The particular page nature turns is “death-foxed,” not just yellowed or brown with age, but possibly inhabited by images of nature’s losses like a page of deceased relatives in a family photo album. If the picture conjured up from Kunitz’s description is of nature sadly turning the pages of its own history, mourning its losses at the hand of its own children (humanity), the reader’s response might be one similar to Christ crucified: empathy for a god under attack from its own, from those who know not what they do.

As one might expect from the title, “The War Against the Trees,” the poem’s last stanza brings readers back to those victims of “war,” those “great-grandfathers of the town / So freshly lopped and maimed,” those “giants” brought “to their knees” in a “seizure” of death. In this last stanza, the trees are toppled, their roots exposed. The craters left behind are “too big for hearts,” these giants being larger in size and in sensitivity than the humans killing them. Kunitz calls the exposed roots, “club-roots” which is also the name for a plant disease caused by a slime mold. Symptoms of the disease include large malformed roots. Because this definition does not fit well with these toppled, healthy elms, club-root is probably a play on club foot, defined as “a congenitally deformed or distorted foot.” Add this personification of tree roots to the word, “amputated,” that follows, and readers are not only presented with murdered bodies, but deformed corpses. The image of club-roots radically morphs with the word, “gorgons,” female monsters with snakes for hair who turn those looking at them to stone. “Gorgons” is a somewhat imperfect attribution because the word might provoke a conflation of trees with monsters rather than tree corpses as monstrous. Apart from this quibble, “gorgons” is effective because the exposure, the sight, of “club-roots” indicates that the once-green earth is being desertified into a treeless, stony moonscape. These gorgons, however, are different from the blindness-causing gorgons of myth since the club-roots do not cause blindness, but are blind, another injury to these sympathy-provoking trees already “maimed,” “lopped,” “amputated,” and brought “to their knees.”

In the last stanza’s fourth line, the blindness metaphor is mixed with an aural component when the gorgon roots cry “Moon,” a kind of synesthesia where a sight (and site) is so offensive it “cries out” to be heard. Yet Kunitz seems doubtful anyone else hears the trees crying out, even if “caught / in the rear-view mirrors of passing cars.” More likely it is that upon seeing the site, drivers will not view it as a slaughter, like the poet. Or, if they do, Kunitz thinks they will be too busy to give it much thought. And if a driver should stop her car and ask Mr. Kunitz (is he not one of the witnesses?) who it is that’s bulldozing the land, he just might answer, “All of us.”

Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2001. Semansky’s most recent collection of poems, Blindsided, has been published by 26 Books of Portland, Oregon and nominated for an Oregon book award.

Theme

Growth and Development“ The War Against the Trees” recounts the bulldozing of a plot of wooded land recently purchased by an oil company and the effect of this destruction on the town and speaker. Throughout the 1950s, an average of three thousand acres of farmland were bulldozed per day for tract housing. Such development was partially enabled by preexisting roads allowing commutes to and from outlying areas. In the fifties, exploding suburban development (houses and stores), caused, in turn, construction of newer and larger roads to accommodate the ever rising numbers of cars that transformed the United States into an oil-dependant nation. And finally, in this chain reaction, increasing oil consumption led to the bulldozing of more land (as in “The War Against the Trees”) to look for oil and provide to the consumer. While Kunitz does not tell readers exactly what purpose the poem’s cleared land will serve, he does write that the bulldozers operate at the behest of Standard Oil, one of the largest oil companies in the world. Against this background, the poem supplies a foreground. Whether slated for offices or drilling operations, the land is eradicated of its flora and denuded of its fauna for the sake of what is usually called growth and development. While growth and development are usually considered positive terms, Kunitz paints the practices behind those words with a more critical brush. “The bulldozers, drunk with gasoline” ready land for more oil production (whether through drilling or administration of delivery systems) thereby enabling mobility. Greater mobility, in turn, leads to more bulldozing of land for roads, development, and oil production. This cycle from production to consumption, commonly referred to as “growth and development,” Kunitz calls “war.”

War and Peace
If the poet refers to growth and development as a war against nature, it appears he thinks there are more battalions of soldiers than the one driving the bulldozers. Another regiment works for the oil company and still another drives cars (Kunitz seems to have left out only road and store builders). Growth and development are usually considered peacetime activities, but Kunitz construes them as acts of war. Human activity can be divided into two major categories, wartime and peacetime. People already know that war kills, not just people, but plants and animals as well. But in “The War Against the Trees,” readers are asked to consider that peace also kills, that peace is also war, less against masses of humanity, but more against masses of plants and animals. The result, as Kunitz sees it, is a devastated battlefield replete with craters, a moonscape devoid of life—human, animal, and vegetable.

Memory and Reminiscence
When the poem’s “corner lot” is bulldozed, plants are killed and animals destroyed and exiled (“the green world turned its death-foxed page”). Something else is killed as well: The past. In the third stanza Kunitz seems to recall a childhood filled with trees, where children played and grew up in the shade. Now he sees an aging process he terms “grievous,” partially because it occurs in a figurative or real suburb with little flora and fauna, and no wilderness. This denuded space is also metaphorically the space of memory, now wiped clean of fond reminiscence, scoured of nostalgia called upon during the often difficult process of growing old, of being what is often termed, “replaced.” If the trees are killed off, the past will be too, and, Kunitz thinks, will no more be a “place” to revisit. The only thing left will be a future devoid of plants and animals and refilled with a very human culture of growth and development. Neither of these terms, the poem suggests, should be confused with progress

The Man He Killed/Theme/Analysis

The Man He Killed

by Thomas Hardy

Poetry analysis:

Thomas Hardy's poem 'The Man He Killed' focuses on the senselessness and futility of war, where a man has killed another quite simply because they were fighting on opposing sides in a war.

Written in the first person from the standpoint of one of the soldiers, the first stanza expresses the idea that the two men who fought would, had they in other circumstances met each other outside a pub, have enjoyed a few drinks ('right many a nipperkin') together. Yet it becomes clear in the second stanza that they in fact met as foot soldiers on opposing sides in a battle, and being confronted with each other, one had to die. The two men shot at each other, and the narrator's shot fatally injured the other man. The writer falters at the end of the opening line of the third stanza as he tries to justify his action. Repeating the word 'because', he states that he had to kill the other soldier since he was his enemy. The third line of this stanza features more repetition, this time of the word 'foe' (enemy); the use of phrases such as 'Just so' and 'of course' suggest that the narrator is trying to convince himself that his action was inevitable. The stanza, however, ends with the word 'although', telling us that the writer is not in fact at ease with the idea that he has killed his enemy. Using enjambment to link to the fourth stanza, the narrator reflects on the fact that the soldier he killed probably decided to join the army ('list is short for enlist) because he had no work and had sold his belongings. The narrator understands this, having been in a similar situation himself and having found himself with no alternative but to join the army. It was not a positive decision, but a last resort when there were no other options.

The final stanza reiterates the main theme of the poem, that war is a strange phenomenon because a soldier finds himself forced to kill a man that he would otherwise have bought a drink for or lent money to, had they met in times of peace. 'Half-a-crown' is the old British money, worth about twelve and a half pence in today's currency. In 1902 that would of course have had considerably more value than it does just over one hundred years later.

The poem is written in a conversational tone, with speech marks included, making us feel that the soldier is addressing us personally in an informal way, and pleading with us to understand his action in killing his enemy. The language is very straightforward and easy to comprehend with the exception of two or three words. There are five stanzas, each of four lines, all of which are inset to a certain degree other than the third in each stanza, creating a regular pattern on the page. The rhyme scheme and rhythm are also regular and give the poem quite a fast pace.

It is easy to appreciate this poem and to identify with the soldier and his feelings, sympathizing with his predicament and sensing that he regrets having had to kill his enemy. We understand that individual soldiers do not necessarily nurture hatred for those they are fighting against, but see them as human beings in circumstances similar to their own, enlisting in order to earn money and support a family. But when facing each other at close range, the reality of war kicks in and one of them must kill the other. The narrator here knows that he could easily have been the one to die. The idea that war is nonsensical when seen at the level of ordinary human beings who are obliged to carry out orders is evident throughout the poem.

Analysis 2

"The Man He Killed" was written in 1902 by Thomas Hardy, an English Victorian poet and writer of fiction. The poem, in the form of a dramatic monologue, is a wonderful example of Hardy's belief in meliorism and his anti-war sentiments.

The poem is spoken in first person, using a young soldier as the speaker. To summarize, the speaker is attempting to explain to others and to him why he killed another soldier, one from the opposing side. Many of Hardy's poems, including this one, reflect Hardy's belief in meliorism. Meliorists believe that society is constantly improving, but only through man's efforts. He felt that either there was not god to save us, or if there were a supreme being, He did not concern himself about man's fate. In other words, we had to save ourselves by helping one another and by being kind to all our fellow creatures.

Hardy was very concerned with man's inhumanity to man, and he felt that war was the ultimate form of this, being planned, organized inhumanity. The poem specifically addresses the Boer War, which Hardy was vehemently against.

The Boer War took place in South Africa, which was largely populated by Dutch farmers. Great Britain was in possession of lands surrounding the Boers. When gold and diamonds were discovered in the Boers' land, however, Britain desired the area, and the Boer War ensued.

"The Man He Killed" basicaly tells the story of a young soldier who off-handedly enlists into the infantry because he needs the salary. He does not fight for some lofty patriotic reason or because he believes in "the cause." After killing his foe, he ponders if perhaps the other young man entered the army for similar reasons:

He thought he'd [en]list, perhaps,
Off-hand, like, just as I -
Was out of work - had sold his traps -
No other reason why.

He explains that had he and the other soldier met under different circumstances, they would probably be buying each other pints in a pub instead of trying to kill each other:

Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

The poem makes it obvious that the speaker understands the senselessness and futility of the war, yet he rationalizes his killing of the man:

I shot him dead because -
Because he was my foe.
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although...

The last stanza sums up the speaker's views on the whole incident:

Yes; strange and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat, where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.

Most of Hardy's poems are pessimistic, reflecting the dark side of man, especially his capacity for violence and cruelty, and this poem is no exception. In fact, "The Man He Killed" is probably one of the poet's most disturbing set of verses. It forces the reader to examine the brutality and inhumanity of war, and to ponder how humans are often victims of sheer circumstance and fate

 

Analysis 3

Innocent Murder

            In a world filled with merciless crimes, it is not rare to hear of people losing their humanity.  Instead, animalistic brutality takes over; chaos and greed conquer the harmony and compassion that most humans desperately long for. The poem "The Man He Killed" by Thomas Hardy illustrates the universal theme of inhumanity that is consequential of war. His anti-war message is incorporated through the elements of characterization, tone, and diction.

The theme of inhumanity is promoted by the narrator's characterization.  While there are few details in this short poem, Hardy includes enough information for the reader to understand his perspective on man's inhumanity toward his fellow man. First of all, the young soldier never indicates that he joined the war for patriotic reasons; of course, war is not always about fighting for one's country or beliefs.  While it has always been customary for uneducated men to join the army, the narrator doesn't seem to take pride in his country or duty. Rather, the soldier notes that he is doing it "off-hand," probably as a means to earn money.  Armies are promoted as united citizens who are fighting for a cause; however, Hardy illustrates that this isn't true.  After all, Hardy characterizes the narrator as being interested in personal gain when he mentions that he enlisted because he was out of work, and the poem fails to mention any cause or loyalty.  In addition, Hardy illustrates that the narrator does not seem to know why he is killing another man and tries to justify his actions.  In the lines "I shot him dead because— / Because he was my foe," the narrator appears to be searching for a reason as to why he is killing another soldier and cannot come up with an adequate answer; the young soldier has no real reason to kill another man except for the fact that he was instructed to by his commanding officers.

        While the narrator's characterization is influential, the tone of the poem also promotes the theme of inhumanity.  Hardy includes indications that he is pessimistic toward war and its effect on humanity; he illustrates war as a cold, planned act of inhumanity against a fellow man.  The lines "You shoot a fellow down / you’d treat if met where any bar is, / or help to half-a-crown" promote that if the narrator and his "foe" had been in different life positions, they could have been good acquaintances or even drinking buddies.  The narrator's subtle signs of remorse indicate that he is troubled by the calculated killing of war; in fact, he compares himself to his enemy, claiming that they are probably in the same situation and joined the army for similar reasons.  Rather, the men's duties to their separate armies lead them to make decisions that include taking another's life.

While the poem's pessimistic tone is influential, the poet's diction also promotes the theme of inhumanity. The lines, "And staring face to face, / I shot at him as he at me, / and killed him in his place" demonstrate the cruelty of the battlefield. The image of the soldiers standing "face to face" and shooting at each other shows the inhumanity involved. The narrator didn't shoot at his enemy from an odd angle or position; rather, they are looking into each other's eyes and attempting to kill the other without personal reasons. In addition, Hardy uses the phrase "...just as I" to compare the narrator to his enemy. The narrator's comparison of himself to his enemy illustrates the humanity that is present within all people; he recognized his enemy as a human being and not simply a target.  Also, the line "...quaint and curious war is" sounds quite unsettling to the reader if one contemplates its meaning. "Quaint" means charming or appealing and rarely is attributed to something as appalling as war.  The diction in that line illustrates the callousness of war; the ironic wording demonstrates that people are unable to grasp soldiers' brutality and heartlessness.  It isn't easy to kill another man, even if it is one's supposed duty. Hardy's choice of words causes the reader to feel the narrator's unsettling emotions about his situation.

            War is a man-made creation, but it is not man's instinct to murder others.  "The Man He Killed" demonstrates the perspective of a young soldier who struggles with his inhumanity in the middle of battle, and he is unable to find good reasoning in pulling the trigger.  He never shows a distinct intent to kill another man, yet he does so because of his obligations to the army.  Hardy wrote during the Boer War in 1902, its theme is timeless. However, just because it is common for mankind to fight and strike down one's fellow man, that doesn't mean humans desire conflict above peace.

Quotation of the Day!

Challenges come so we can grow and be prepared for things we are not equipped to handle now. When we face our challenges with faith, prepared to learn, willing to make changes, and if necessary, to let go, we are demanding our power be turned on.

by-Iyanla Vanzant