War Photographer is an emotional poem, designed to move, but also inform the reader. Carol Ann Duffy tries to reflect the views of a photographer conveying the pictures of suffering and grief back home- England. The structure of the poem allows the second and third as well as the last two lines of every stanza to rhyme and have equal syllables.

The poet uses many contrasts in the second stanza, describing the troubles of normal life to the distresses of war. There are also many metaphors related to the whole idea of drawing, somewhat ironic and ambiguous, disparities between religious reconciliation and violent conflict. Yet, the stem of the poem remains loyal to the spectacle of the photographer. There are lot of complex ideas floating from the writing but the poet does well in trying to anchor them, whilst allowing a certain volume of economical ambiguity to fill the readers' mind. Perhaps the poem is about pictures- and not any other aspect of reporting war- because images capture the moment, capture the passion and capture the reader...and are a constant reminder of the sorrow they snapped.
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Something is happening. A stranger's features faintly start to twist b4 his eyes, a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries of this man's wife...

These are the first lines of the third paragraph. They carry a powerful message about a simple perception, allied to the whole idea of photography. The poet employs a short, palpable but subtle sentence to intrigue the reader as a way to initiate the stanza. She is describing the developing photograph, whose image is not yet clear, but tangible enough to relate to the photographer's deep emotion and his broad awareness of the ...

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