The second section, personal grief, is about one individual receiving a telegram telling her that her husband is dead and how she reacts to this. This is showing you that the war doesn’t just affect the people in it, but also the innocent people around it. In this section Hughes uses lots of short, simple sentences that build up the image of this widow as opposed to the last section, which was made up of just two long sentences. I like the way Hughes does this because it gives you the information slowly and not just all at once which is like what the widow must be trying to do, take in all the events slowly. In this section Hughes uses some very interesting metaphors and similes to produce more striking images. One such simile is when he compares the telegram to a bomb “that dives to the cellar and lifts the house.” He did this because, like the bomb, the telegram goes to her foundations and lifts them. Another similarity between this bomb and the telegram is that even though the bomb would destroy the house and the telegram would destroy the women, hardly any damage shows through on the outside. Another interesting simile Hughes uses is when he compares the woman’s love for her husband to a hawser, an iron rope used to hold large boats. A hawser is an extremely strong rope but if it breaks it whips back very fast and could hurt someone. This is like their love, it was very strong but now it is broken lashes back, “blinding and severing”. This is a very clever simile because it also shows that the stronger the rope, or the love, the more damage can be made when it is broken.
The third section, practical grief, was the section I found most interesting, it describes the clean-up that has to take place after the war is over, the burial of the many dead soldiers littering the war zones. The reason why I like this section over the others was because it is very different from any other war poem that I have read. Instead of trying to glorify the war or make it seem emotional this sections deals with what has to happen after the war. It is very crude in this way but that is why I found it interesting.
One of the phrases that show this crudeness is, “the valley full of dead men”. This is a metaphor because there isn’t literally a valley full of dead men. By using the word valley full Hughes makes quite a disgusting image. Another phrase that shows the crudeness of this section is: -
“The jolted shape of a face, earth into the mouth”
In this phrase Hughes doesn’t try to hide the truth with lots of poetic imagery, he just tells you the bare truth. The word “jolted” is quite a rough sounding word and emphasizes the roughness of this phrase. The second part, “earth into the mouth” makes the phrase quite horrific as you slowly gain an image of what has to be done now the war is over.
In this section Hughes uses quite a lot of onomatopoeic words, such as, “hack”, “grunt”, “sweat”, “thud”, “flung” and “jolted”. These words actually rough and help to build up the ghastly images Hughes is trying to make.
This section deals with the practical side of the war; it tells you that the war doesn’t just end when someone has won. Even when the war is over there is still lots of work left to be done, such as the cleaning up of the war zones. A phrase that shows this is, “weighing their grief by the ounce, and burying it”. In this case the “grief” actually refers to the bodies the burial party has to get rid of and is not so much grief as in sadness, but grief as in hard work. This phrase actually links back to the second section of the poem, personal grief, because unlike the burial party, who are burying their grief, the widow will probably have to carry her grief around with her for the rest of her life.
Hughes also tries to show you that the job of burying these bodies would have been quite disgusting. That is why he puts in the description of the body being “flung down”, “earth into the mouth”. He then goes on to describe this as a “moment that could annihilate a watcher”. This shows you what the burial party has to deal with; even just watching them working would be enough to horrify a normal person. The biggest problem, according to Hughes, for the burial party is the hot weather and the “black lively flies”, “lively” because of all the rotting bodies lying around.
Throughout the whole poem Hughes uses a lot of metaphors and similes. An interesting simile in this section is when Hughes compares the dead bodies to waiting brides, “the dead wait like brides”. Nowadays the only similarity between a dead body and a bride would be that the dead have white skin and brides wear a white dress but Hughes could have also compared the two because he thought they were both powerless, laying there waiting to be taken.
This last section is my favourite section because, in it, Hughes is showing you that war does not finish when one side has won, lots more work has to be done after it. It also makes you realise how horrible war is and even started me wondering whether war is worth all this. Not only is the meaning and the content of this poem good but Hughes also manages to get it all across to the reader using lots of interesting metaphors and similes, he also includes complex imagery and descriptions.
