‘Thus the commandant at Belsen Camp going home for the day with fumes of human roast clinging rebelliously to his hairy nostrils will stop at the wayside sweet-shop and pick up a chocolate for his tender offspring’. This stanza is clearly contrasts good and evil. A tremendously evil man who spends his days slaughtering innocent families will go home to his family with goodies for his children and where he is a completely different person, a caring father and a loving husband.
The theme is similar to that in the poem ‘What were they like?’ The US Forces killed many innocent men, women and children and caused devastating affects to the countries land and lives of millions in order to win a war. Only when they realised the terror they had caused and that it was too late, they withdrew they part in the war returned home to they families to live happily ever after.
Although the themes of the poems are practically the same each poet delivers their point in different ways and also describes different aspects of war. Chinua Achebe choose to describe war from the side of the commanders and soldiers and Denise Levertov choose to describe war from the side of the countries people and how war effected them.
The meaning of each poem lives up to the titles. By reading the title ‘Vultures’ you immediately think of the scavenger creature. And ‘What they were like?’ a phrase like this will be used to describe how something or someone was meaning they are no longer like that. In the poem ‘they’ are no longer the way they were because ‘they’ have been killed and forgotten about, ‘they’ meaning the peasant of Vietnam during the war.
Denise Levertov uses the word ‘Sir’ more than once. I think she choose to use this word to show how soldiers would address their commanders.
Denise Levertov uses a unique structure for the poem. She uses a sequence of numbered questions followed by the answers. The questions are to the point and reflect the innocent lives of the poor peasants living in Vietnam at the time of the war.
Chinua Achebe’s poem seems to be set out in four verses but actually it is two. The verses are separated by the word ‘Strange’. Between lines 21-40 Achebe uses emphasis (…) to show that it’s continuing but then he moves the subject to show there’s something missing. Like this phrase ‘in easy range of cold telescopic eyes… Strange indeed how love in the other ways so particular’, he seems to be observing the animals from a distance. At first he has just finished describing the nasty side of the creature then it’s as if his is interrupted by what we see as strange behaviour for a vulture, where they show each other love.
Denise Levertov wanted to put across the fact that no justice was bought to those who lost their lives due to war, instead they were silenced; she felt very strongly about this a put her view down very straight forward. Her questions are to the point but the questions are a bit vague, they have a deeper mean than they appear.
In Levertov’s poem she says ‘their singing resembled the flight of moths in the moonlight. Who can I say? It is silent now’. This reflects how people especially the men who caused the suffering, would rather forget the horrendous images of dying innocence and pretend it never happened. For example, ‘Sir, their light hearts turned to stone. It is not remembered whether in gardens stone lanterns illumined pleasant ways ’ this means that it is not remembered because when the land was bombed the people and land was burnt down to nothing.
The poems appear on the outside to be about simple ideas but between the lines there are some powerful thoughts. Vultures seem to be about the disgusting creature, Chinua Achebe uses them only to comment of a particular type of people. In what were they like? It seems to be only about individuals-the peasants but it’s really about big political events. Vultures symbolises people who benefit from others who are suffering and again this also contrasts with the Northern Communists in Vietnam who won a brutal war at the expense of innocent people.
