Month: April 2015

Essay Question: Compare the ways poets show how conflict and war can affect feelings about a place in ‘At the Border 1979’ and one other poem from Conflict.

Emotions were very important whilst studying the difference between both poems.

‘At the border’ was a poem that had created a sense of fear and the urge to escape within the characters. This is a key consequence of war. Many people over the world constantly have to move from country to country looking for a safer place to make a living for them and their children. The poet was very smart by using this type of situation to  create a feeling of happiness and glory after what was to be described as a land that was less beautiful than what was ahead. The fourth stanza was quite important considering it described most about the country that they were just in, which was Iran. The paragraph stated ‘My mother informed me: We are going home. She said that the roads are much cleaner, the landscape is more beautiful and people are much kinder. This was crucial in making the war sound like they had not had much happiness. In much cases, migrating from a war can be very pessimistic or unhappy, but in this case the scene was described so positively that the reader would think that the asylum seekers would want to go back to their home town. This is where the poem changed very much and it took a turn, unlike Come On Come Back.

‘Come On, Come Back’ was a poem that would create relief, but at the same time sadness, because of the lack of human activity and the hint that someone had died, following what had previously happened.The poem was much less like a story (At The Border), but had described the event that had occurred just after a battle. The poet also made the mood quite melancholy by describing how Vaudevaue (the girl) was alone, just tapping her finger, it seemed as if she was awaiting her death. The whole feeling of this had no excitement or happiness, it was just very dull and tranquil in the environment around the two characters involved. The reason I mentioned that the poem created relief, was because the war was over and the girl was moving, but very sporadically. This poem would much more play with the reader’s emotions way more than At The Border, which was quite forward to capture thee feelings expressed by the author, or how he wanted to express the character’s feelings.

All in all, I believe there is a massive contrast in the way both these very war-stricken poem have used feelings. Both have some similar value but in the very end, those value either had nothing in common anymore or they had changed in emotion. One in the end was clearly happy and the other was quite sad. They were quite different in context and they also had completely different movements in them, which also separated them from each other.

How does the first stanza set the scene for Vaudevue’s death? Think about language used.

The first stanza sets a scene of death clearly by the word play throughout the whole paragraph. The phrase ‘left by’ indicates that the main character in the first half (the girl) was not guided by herself, but in fact she was left by the battle that had previously occurred. This that there was no sense of awareness and she was left to die. Throughout the poem, she doesn’t make any sudden movements, which also indicates a sense of weakness that can relate to the death of this girl. Being alone is also another factor we can use when asked how the poem is linked to death. Both characters in the poem are very isolated, which is a sign of loneliness or death.

The poem’s subtitle is ‘Incident in a future war’. What features of the poem fit in with the idea that it takes place in the future?

Imtiaz Dharker has showed a strong representation of discrimination in the poem ‘The Right Word’ which is clearly a very blatant way to blur the reader’s observation as to how the person feel in the poem. I think she has also expressed the consequences and effects of conflict in a much stronger way by balancing each stanza to a different interpretation towards the person who was supposedly trying to become a hidden presence. For example, she first construes the person as a terrorist very boldy, but then as the poem begins to unravel, she begins to lighten up on the subject, describing the person to be ‘taking shelter’ instead of hiding in the shadows