In stanza seven, we find that the old man was living in Blenheim at the time of the battle; at which time an army invaded his town and burnt it to the ground. In this stanza, I believe that the poets views are that war usually always involves a third-party, such as civilians and innocent people, who do not take part in the fighting, but are inevitably the victims of war or battle, simply, innocent people are always killed in war. The poet uses alliteration when he says that his father was ‘forced to fly’ and that he and his family had no where to live. There is another example of alliteration in the next stanza when he says the country side ‘was wasted far and wide’.
The language at the start of ‘After Blenheim’ is very peaceful, idyllic and calm, with lines like, ‘summer evening’, ‘sported on the green’ and ‘sitting in the sun’ for example. The clever use of this picturesque description lures you into a false sense of security, making you think that the poem has a happy ending, but it doesn’t completely changing subject from a happy, peaceful environment to an atmosphere of war, death and unhappiness.
The first indication that something is not right is the introduction of the skull. The poet talks of the child finding something ‘large and smooth and round’ which immediately makes the reader think of a football or similar toy. When it is revealed that the child has found a skull, this makes us feel very uneasy and we know that this is not a poem about pleasant English summer evenings. The thought of the child, so innocent, playing with something so gruesome as a skull and not realising what it was is very shocking.
The language changes again in stanza eight when the poet says, ‘And new born baby died’ this immediately jerks you into another emotion and situation within the poem. For example when the poet says words like, ‘fled’, ‘died’, ‘bodies’ and ‘shocking’ and so on, it is especially effective when he says, ‘newborn baby died’ because the death of someone so very young and completely innocent is very shocking.
In ‘The Hyenas’ the poet talks about the devastation of war, and how it reinforces the unfairness of war on innocent people, e.g. when an army attacks a city, and innocent civilians are killed. The tone throughout ‘The Hyenas’ is always very dark and evil, doesn’t change anywhere in the whole poem, this creates a very heavy atmosphere, and drags the reader into believing that war is dark and evil from the start. I also think that Robert Southey, the poet, believes that soldiers are just tools, replaceable and discarded easily, that they are all just trained to march into battle and die for their country. This may be believed to be honourable and brave, but also sad as they are disregarded just like pieces in a board game.
Also in ‘The Hyenas’, poet Rudyard Kipling writes how Hyenas have a higher and more powerful position over humans. Humans in ‘The Hyenas’ are described as being the lowest creature out of the two, therefore they are less important then Hyenas. The Hyenas are constantly personified to be devilish and evil.
In the first stanza of ‘The Hyenas’, the line ‘After the burial-parties leave and the baffled kites have fled’, present the idea that after a major battle people have arrived to bury the bodies properly, leaving behind few traces of what went on in battle and the birds who might have picked over the flesh of the dead wonder where they have gone to. He goes on to say that the dead soldiers are easy, safe meat to the Hyenas who are carrion animals. If they can dig up the bodies they can feast and thrive without having to work too hard in the process as the dead can’t fight back. He uses imagery about the natural world in comparing the fight that even the weakest creatures will put up against a hyena attack ‘For a goat may butt, and a worm may sting’. I think he is also using this imagery to compare the soldiers in war to animals fighting for survival in the natural world. Is this what human life has come to as a result of war? Worth nothing except to feed some wild animals? The poet is going one stage further here than he has before in introducing the idea of soldiers being some kind of cattle, sent to war to feed the carrion animals.
In both poems, the poets feelings about war is that they are catastrophically phenomenal, and leave hundreds of people without their homes, and without each other, completely destroyed. Wars affect everyone on a large scale. In ‘After Blenheim’ the poet’s thoughts on war, seem, I believe at first, to be the opposite of what ‘The Hyenas’ is saying because in ‘After Blenheim’, the poet repeats that the Battle of Blenheim was a huge and great victory for the English. He is saying that he believes that wars always end for one side in a great victory, usually achieved for a good cause but for the other side they are a total failure and the costs are huge. I think on second reading that his references to ‘that great victory’ or ‘famous victory’ are ironic because at the same time, he is saying that many men died and that whilst it was a victory for one side, it was a terrible loss all round. It asks the questions - Does good always prevail? Is it wrong to fight for a cause we believe in if the costs are so huge?
At the end of the poem in ‘The Hyenas’ in the last two lines when the poet says, ‘Nor do they defile the dead man’s name – That is reserved for his kind.’ He means by this that the Hyenas do not care who the human was that they dug up, because they are higher than humans in status so they can do what they like with human bodies. They just eat the meat and don’t worry about who or what it came from. In the last line in stanza two the poet says ‘And dig till they come to it.’ The ‘it’ in that line is referring to a soldier who probably had a family and people who loved him but he has been depersonalised by that one word, ‘it’. This once again shows that the poet considers that soldiers are not cared for by the very people they fight for – they are numbers on a list or insignificant pieces in a larger ‘game’.
Many of the war poets were moved to write poetry which reflected the bravery of the soldiers involved alongside the futility and appalling waste caused by war. It is amazing that out of something so bloody and awful, inspiration to write so beautifully and powerfully is born.
