From someone’s point of view, a war maybe just another pay rise to a photographer. But from Duffy’s way of thinking, the photographer is going through emotional agony trying to forget what his lens has captured. He has to deal with the guilt of not being able to offer help to those who he has desperately harassed and published their miserable lives in a cheap paper.
The photographer must have seen too many corpses, injuries and gallons of blood. This maybe an explanation to “all flesh is grass” as if every blade of grass was replaced by blood, due to the amount of it. But what is he to do about it? He needs to capture the moments that would appeal to the readers. So he has no choice, this is an example of the line “solutions slop in trays”. Meaning that the photographer, soldiers and the government are running out of ideas and ways to solve problems by overcoming violence.
The atmosphere in this poem is very blameful. It accuses almost everyone of being a monster. It makes the photographer seem like he has done something utterly wrong, laying out a “hundred agonies in black-and-white” as if it was something ordinary. Then it moves onto blaming the readers. And how we, on the receiving end of the article, are throwing away the message that the paper is trying to get across to us.
The style and structure of War Photographer is very basic, 4 stanzas with the same amount of lines in each one. But this could also be done on purpose; knowing that this poem is very realistic and sends across a powerful message is saying that an everyday basic item you see could have a very unique and meaningful purpose to it, for example, the news paper. It’s very common and basic but the news it contains inside could have an impact on the entire world.
“How can she know what we really are” and “from the distance, we look so terribly human”. These two lines have a strong meaning about the people that aren’t encountered with war very often. The girl in the photograph, her life has been erased, her family was killed, her home was demolished all of who she has loved are never to be seen again. So in the photograph, is she running towards the camera? Or is she running towards us seeing as we are the only ones that can offer her help. And 5,000 miles away we are negatively affected about the everyday weather. We have no idea what life must be like for her, weather would be the least of her problems but for us, it’s possibly one of the biggest pains we go through each day. What does that say about the way we live each day, how much do we really value life? Maybe we are the monsters in this situation and not the photographer. We are the ones that scan the article between our daily routines, and ignore it completely. Example of “the reader’s eyeballs prick with tears between bath and pre-lunch beers” And who are we to judge the photographer? He is trying to raise awareness, inform us about the way these people suffer, and giving us options to possibly provide help. And yet we can only feel sorry for the victims, whilst sorry has lost all meaning, it is just a word to make us seem like a better person.
I believe that Kate Daniels is attempting to make the girl in the photograph an example of remorse. Daniels mentions so many agonies that the girl must of went through such as “from the bodies of her mother and sister thrown down into a ditch” and “the world turned to trash behind her”. These are some of the lines that make us feel guilt and remorse for the girl in the photograph.
The style and structure of War Photograph is slightly more complex than War Photographer. The first small stanza is a very brief introduction to what the poem is based on. Then as it goes down through the second stanza it explains things far more dramatically and in deep detail. Line seven to sixteen explains how her whole life was demolished, and then lines seventeen to thirty-four talks about how we are her only help, and yet we are the ones that care least about her life.
In conclusion Kate Daniels considers the realities of war by the story behind the photograph of the little girl. But Daniels focuses on the reality of war in the media, especially the paper. She knows what we think when we come to look at the photograph and she realises what our reactions will be towards it, that’s how Daniels considers the realities of war. Carol Ann Duffy considers the realities of war through the photographer’s eyes, the way he sees everything in terror but yet he has a job to do so he must not let all the visual agony hold him back. And she also compares the photographer’s working environment against the battle field and the ways it could possibly remind him of the suffering he has seen. This is the way Caron Ann Duffy considers the realities of war.
Roman Moore