How Does Duffy Use Reflections On The Past To Express Feelings, Experience And Ideas.

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Ibrahim Ferullo

How Does Duffy Use Reflections On The Past To Express Feelings, Experience And Ideas

        

Carol Ann Duffy writes the War Photographer.  The poem is about Don McCullen a close friend of McCullen who was a war photographer.  The poem is set in a darkroom where the war photographer is developing his pictures and making order of the pictures that are so chaotic.  While he is developing his pictures it brings back memories and the suffering he witnessed and could not stop due to his line of work.  The poem is written in the 3rd person and in the present tense making the poem even more effective.

        Throughout the poem the priest is used to symbolise the preparing of the photos and the dealing of pain and suffering.  The first line shows the reader the setting, ‘in his darkroom he is finally alone’.  I felt that this means he is relieved to be out of the chaos of war and pain.  ‘With spools of suffering set out in ordered rows’, this shows the photographer doing the almost impossible task of putting order to extreme suffering.  ‘The only light is red’, Duffy introduces the theme of a priest preparing for mass (wine at church is prepared in red light).  ‘As though he were a church and he a priest preparing to intone in Mass Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh’. The reader can imagine the photographer carefully preparing each individual photo and remembering each place he has been to.  ‘All flesh is grass’, this shows the bitter reality, and the war photographer knows life is short, its jus a part of life, you live and die.  The silence in the verse shows the sacredness of the work.

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        ‘He has a job to do’, his life is job although the memories are painful he still has to carry on.  ‘Hands which did not tremble then though seem to now’, the memories of the suffering are coming back to him.  It is almost as if he has shellshock from the chaos he experienced.  This is contrast to ‘Rural England’ where there is only ‘ordinary pain’; the problems at home are nothing to the problems he saw.  The contrast is shown in the final 2 lines of the verse, ‘to fields that don’t explode beneath the feet of running ...

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