Analysis of the Imagery and Sensuous Appeal: "The Battle" by Louis Simpson.

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Hernandez

Miguel A. Hernández Calderón

INGL 3211 Section 101

Dr. K. Ferracane

Analysis of the Imagery and Sensuous Appeal:  

“The Battle” by Louis Simpson

        “The Battle” by Louis Simpson is a poem about a battle during the Second World War. This poem uses strong imagery and sensuous appeal to project its message.  In this essay I am going to analyze some elements of imagery in “The Battle” and their relevance to the plot of the poem.  One of the most important of these elements is a pattern of repetition of the color red in three of its four stanzas.  The other is the uncomfortable ness felt by the soldiers and how it is projected to the reader.  

        Red’s usual symbolism relates to passion, warmth or emotions, in “The Battle” red does appeal to emotions and feelings but mainly to unpleasant or unlikable ones.  In the first stanza the color red is used to describe the reddish dark color of the night falling.  The color red in this case is taken from the “circle of a throat” (3); this is why we imply that it is a very dark red, almost black.  This is usually not a pleasant color, and that is exactly what the author wants to establish, a distasteful atmosphere.  The next appearance of the color red comes in a very contradicting image: black snow.  Snow typically carries a representation of pureness in its white; however this image is corrupted in “The Battle” by showing it in the opposite to white: black.  The blackness of the snow can come from various activities like for example the mixture of snow and dirt from the digging (they dug to set camp) or blood.  Blood carries a very dark tone of red and in the snow can appear to be black.  In the line after this last manifestation of red comes some more red.  “The corpses stiffened in their scarlet hoods” (12): the hoods on the dead are colored red too.  The bodies are probably covered in blood and the author illustrates it as a hood.  And again with the repetition of the red comes the ghastly effect it carries in this poem.  Next is the emergence of a very bright red which is almost orange, in the ember of a cigarette.  As we reach the end of the poem the pace slows down, and a more relaxed ambient is evident in the last stanza.  The soldiers, though tired, were enjoying cigarettes and seem to be more relaxed.  As we zoom-in in this image towards the cigarette we can observe a much brighter tonality of red.  This relates the apparent relaxed atmosphere the soldiers are enjoying at the moment.  

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        The poem also uses sensory images to give the reader a hint of what the soldier goes through during battle.  The thudding of guns is one of these.  “Somewhere up ahead Guns thudded.”: with the speed the poem has at the moment that sentence comes into action you can feel their marching and the thudding of those guns, also the rhythm in this part of the poem provokes a feeling of speed and the strong low blows made by the thudding.  During cold times humidity is a horrible thing to feel.  The soldiers had to dig in “clammy earth” which ...

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