To what extent are the 'war' poems you have read protesting the wars they describe?

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Mahmoud El Hazek        English Coursework        04-02-03

        Rough Draft

        Mr. A. Thirkell

To what extent are the ‘war’ poems you have read protesting the wars they describe?

A.E Housman and Thomas Hardy, both highly recognised poets, wrote their poems in response to the same war. This war, The Boer War (1899-1902) is affectively described in their writing, particularly by Hardy In ‘Drummer Hodge’ and ‘A Christmas Ghost Story’, and by Housman in ‘Astronomy’. It is clear to me that these poems are protesting, by choice of language and theme, the wars they describe.

        Walt Whitman, America’s foremost poet of the time of the Civil War (1861-1864), wrote poems that were affected by his own intimate experience of the war. During the year of December 1862, Whitman travelled to Washington D. C to care for his brother who was wounded as a result of the battle. He then decided to stay and work in hospitals to help those in need. A reader is made to see his poems, ‘Reconciliation’ and ‘A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim’ in the light of this highly personal involvement with wounded men. Although each of the five poems deals with the same theme, they do so in different ways: Whitman’s poems are a close, intimate association of himself with the confederate dead. His poems simply explore a personal ethic of absolute identification with “enemies”, whereas Hardy and Housman’s poems show war to be essentially bleak and tragic.

Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’ is a powerful evocation of a single soldier’s tragic death. The poet shows the Boer war in grim terms showing how a trooper is mistreated and dishonoured.

        

The poem starts by describing Hodge’s burial peremptory, ‘They throw in Drummer Hodge’. This suggests to us that Drummer Hodge is treated ignobly at death. Even worse, Hodge is left ‘unconfined’. From my understanding, Hardy is emphasising that Hodge is brutally disregarded, and in doing so Hardy suggests the war held no glory for anyone.

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Hardy goes onto show that Hodge’s death is meaningless. He dies in a place he does not know for an unknown cause:

 ‘Young Hodge the Drummer never knew-fresh from his Wessex home the meaning of the broad Karoo, The Bush, the dusty loam, and why uprose to nightly view strange stars amid the gloam’.

 

This also suggests that his death was for an meaningless cause. Not only was Hodge isolated by man kind, he was young and innocent. We are encouraged to sympathise with him when the poet uses his name to provide him with a distinctive and very ...

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