A close look at the assigned poem by Howard Nemerov 'D-Day and all the years' and focused mainly on the identity of the speaker, his or hers relation to the author, and the poetic techniques that Nemerov has used to achieve his aims
Assigned was Howard Nemerov’s poem “D-Day + All the Years”
For the following essay I have taken a close look at the assigned poem by Howard Nemerov and focused mainly on the identity of the speaker, his/hers relation to the author, and the poetic techniques that Nemerov has used to achieve his aims.
The first thing I want to describe is my view of the situation in this poem. What is going on? To my opinion the speaker has just been asked something about his/her father by the addressee, who noticed a picture of this man in the speaker’s house. The speaker seems very eager on this prompting to tell the story, since the answer to this question starts before the first line has ended, directly after the repeated question. The last line could also refer to this scene, when the speaker points at the picture and says: ‘And more or less the way you see him now’. The photograph might be one of the heroic father dressed in his military outfit.
Dealing with the speaker’s gender, I would like to make a case for the speaker being a woman for several reasons. Firstly, the fact that the speaker keeps referring to the father as ‘Daddy’. But moreover because of the way in which the speaker describes everything and particularly elaborates on what her father was wearing during the operation. This fairly detailed description of his clothes goes on for the whole last stanza. Also the whole poem seems to have a chattering ring to it, which is enhanced by the fact that it is written in free verse. One might object that a iambic pentametre can be discerned, for instance in the first four lines and in the eigth to eleventh line, alternated with some anapests. It is my opinion, however, that there are too many instances where the verse departs from this fixed form and where not only the sort of feet differ, but more importantly you can not find five feet to a line. What I did notice was that the first and the last line are in fact written in a perfect iambic pentametre, so in a way this “closes” the open poem, as does the fact that both of these lines have to do with (pointing at) the photograph. Finally, I would like to stress the fact that the iambic pentametre is the verse that tends to be the closest related to the spoken language, which is exactly what Nemerov is aiming at here, the chattering of a vain woman.