The poem Vergissmeinicht has originated from a small incident or experience. The poem is written by Keith Douglas. Vergissmeinicht contains a universal statement, it is that the enemy may be the enemy at war but a much-loved person at home.

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The poem Vergissmeinicht has originated from a small incident or experience. The poem is written by Keith Douglas. Vergissmeinicht contains a universal statement, it is that the enemy may be the enemy at war but a much-loved person at home.

        

        Douglas has included an incident in which I think the poem has originated from. The incident is based during the war, where there had recently been a battle. The incident begins when the enemy soldiers, only a small group, have returned to find a scene where they had fought before only to find a dead soldier who had been badly wounded. The reader is firstly notified by receiving the impression that the soldier was still alive lying sprawling in the sun,

                “and found the soldier sprawling in the sun”

But he was not, as he was killed in the last battle by the soldiers who stood over him, he lies decaying in the sun. The reader is given the thought that the dead soldier was lying dead in the state that he was because he hit the opposition’s tank. The soldiers look in the gun pit and find a photograph of the lady who belongs to the soldier to be found lying dead. As the poem goes on, Douglas puts a deeper message into it; that soldiers have two sides to their lives.

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        Douglas changes the tone of the poem gradually through stanza by stanza. The first stanza is based on a common everyday war experience. The tone in this stanza is showing that time has past. The first stanza contains a double meaning-in the first line in “Combatants gone” the double meaning is referring to the army, it is telling the reader that either the armies have moved on to another battlefield or that they have both been wiped out. The last line of the first stanza indicates to the reader that the ‘soldier sprawling in the sun’ is harmless; this ...

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