Homecoming by Bruce Dawe.

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- Year 11 Advanced English -

HOMECOMING Bruce Dawe

Bruce Dawe writes of his experiences in the Vietnam War in the poem “Homecoming”. By using many different language techniques he conveys his sadness and sympathy for the loss of the lives of the young soldiers.

Repeated use of the pronoun “they’re”, hints at the impersonal relationship between the bodies and their handlers. Repetition of the suffix “-ing” in “bringing”, “zipping”, “picking”, “tagging”, and “giving”, describing the actions of the body processors, establishes irony. These verbs imply life and vitality, in stark contrast to the limp, lifeless, cold body that they handle each day. Repetition is used effectively to highlight the shocking brutality that has manifested in all wars throughout history. It is shocking that “they’re giving them names” since a name is one of the few identifying features left on the plethora of otherwise anonymous, mutilated bodies.

Dawe then writes of how the soldiers are ‘tagged’ and the seemingly unsympathetic way that the soldiers are classified – ‘curly-heads, kinky-hairs, crew-cuts, balding non-coms’. This, however, is not to show the classifying of the soldiers as cold and unsympathetic, but rather to emphasize that the class, race etc. of the soldiers is not important in war and this emphasizes the soldier’s loss of identity- they are not seen as a person, a brother, a son, a husband, but just as another dead soldier to be ‘tagged and bagged’.

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Dawe uses the metaphor ‘the steaming chow mein’ to describe and satire the Vietnam jungle. Looking down from the plane that carries the corpses, a person would see only a mess of browns, greens, yellows – like the vegetables in a chow mein.

Further metaphors are used in the lines’ their shadows are tracing the blue curve of the Pacific with sorrowful quick fingers, heading south, heading east’. The Pacific is described as a “blue curve”, again describing the view from the windows of the jets. The use of “ sorrowful quick fingers” – personification- to describe the shadows of ...

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