A word on Birthday Letters

When thinking about “Conflicting Perspectives” it is worth remembering a few things:

• Hughes is in a position of power as he has the final say and can say what he likes without any chance of a rebuff or response.
• He has chosen to give the work the title “Birthday Letters”. ‘ Birthday’ has positive connotations and “letters” implies intimacy and an element of truth or objectivity.
•  Think about the times when people write letters, think about purpose, audience and tone. Under what circumstances would letters be written and in what form/s ?
• Now consider why Hughes has written “Letters” in a chronological poetic form? What does the poetic verse bring to the subject matter in terms of  ‘conflicting perspectives’ ?
• Does (and if so, then HOW) form influence representation of the situation, events and personalities?

Ted Hughes: A Talented Murderer

Ted Hughes: A Talented Murderer

from: http://1lit.tripod.com/june2001.html

by Nadeem Azam

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

Sylvia Plath, ‘Ariel’

If a man’s wife commits suicide he attracts and, in most cases deserves, sympathy and support; for his next partner to go on to do the same thing (and take the life of their child at the same time), only six years later, inevitably leads to suspicions about his character and deserves investigation.

Unfortunately, by virtue of being both a man and a talented writer, Ted Hughes’ indiscretions and contributions towards the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Welville have been largely confined to the feminist lobby and, as a result, been given short shrift. As one writer put it: “He was a great man and nothing was said or done to disturb the aura around him.”

When Ted Hughes used to give readings he would often be confronted by demonstrators holding placards which accused him of murdering Sylvia Plath. Plath’s grave in Yorkshire has repeatedly been desecrated with the letters ‘Hughes’ hacked off her name on the headstone. The recent revelations about her husband’s philanderous behaviour and lack of faithfulness to any of his wives are sure to incite haters of Hughes even further.

A new book has been published which exposes yet more womanising by Hughes, names another mistress of his, and suggests he fathered a fourth, unacknowledged child.

In May 2001, the Australian Jill Barber revealed her four-year affair with the late Poet Laureate in an account replete with all the lupine cliché that now threatens to overwhelm him. She told a journalist Hughes doesn’t speak; he “growls”; he looks like Heathcliff; he is “rough, passionate and forceful”.

Some detractors of Hughes, who had maintained a campaign against him because of his adulterous behaviour, softened their villification of the poet after the publication in 1998 of “Birthday Letters” in which, for the first time, he poured out his heart to the world and delved into his relationship with Plath.

He wrote about her with passion (“St Botolph’s”), and with tenderness and affection. Hughes recalled scenes from their courtship and marriage with precision – the peach scrunched outside Charing Cross station; the student parties (that famous bite/kiss), the first love-making (“You were slim and lithe and smooth as a fish”).

But he also shifts the blame entirely onto Plath for her ending. On first reading, there does seem to be a narrative of explanation that can be lifted out of these poems: that Sylvia Plath was doomed by the eight-year-old girl inside her who failed to grieve a father who died too soon; that her whole project (“trajectory perfect as if through ether”) was to get back to that father in his grave (whereas Hughes had “no more purpose in me than my own dog which I did not have”).

This leaves Hughes no option but to go seeking for them both: “big shock to meet me face to face in the dark adit where I have come looking for your daughter” (this, one of the only two poems not addressed to Plath, comes near the end, as if Hughes was left with no other place to go). According to this story, from very early on, Plath was heading inexorably to her death, and Hughes was a helpless bystander. If Hughes’s earlier poetry often reads as a tribute to a nature in excess of his own mastery, this would then be the first time that such a force at which he also marvels so utterly defeats him.

He also admits the differences which separate them – things which surface as local problems, but which generally signify a larger, subterranean divide. (On honeymoon: “Spain frightened you. Spain/Where I felt at home.”)

But precisely because what Hughes is writing about is a form of energy with a strength and will of its own, no attempt – if indeed this is the attempt – to hand it over to Plath alone, to her distressed and haunted selfhood as he sees it, can work. Lines like these, often cited over the past three years, are almost too easy to lift out of the poems: “auditioned for the male lead in your drama”, “I was a fly outside on the window pane / of my own domestic drama”, “Your life was a liner I voyaged in”, “Inside your Bell Jar / I was like a mannikin in your eyeball”. But they only tell half, if indeed that much, of the story.

Time and again, Hughes also has a dig at Plath lobbyists:
“Who caught all
That teeming population, every one,
To hang their tortured eyes and tongues up
In your poems?”
If this is true, then her readers are dupes. All they have is “the empty mask’”of her genie; or gloves from which “the hands have vanished”. Or worse, they are the guilty party to the crime:
“In the wilderness
Between the locusts and the honey
They demanded it. On, no problem
If that’s all you want,
You said, and you gave it.”
In the penultimate poem, addressed to his children, Hughes writes about those who have written about Plath’s work:

”Let them
Jerk their tail-stumps, bristle and vomit
Over their symposia.”

“Birthday Letters” produced a caricature of feminism as always pitying Plath and blaming Hughes as a man with no heart to speak of. This, of course, enraged legions of people who felt sympathy for Plath. The British literary critic Asad Yawar said the anthology “was an apologist diatribe concealed in honey” the feminist poet Robin Morgan told “Newsweek”: “My teeth began to grind uncontrollably.”

There’s no question of Hughes finding ways to forgive himself for leaving Plath. By giving us his account of her psychic history inside his portrait of their domestic history, he creates a long perspective in which sudden actions become comprehensible – or at least inevitable. “What happens in the heart simply happens.”

Even in his otherwise surprisingly-candid last interview with the “Daily Telegraph’s” Eilat Negev he shirked responsibility and was cagey when Plath was raised. When prompted about what may have caused her suicide he replies: “It’s too complicated. There are too many theories.”

It is obvious from both Hughes revelations and Plath’s own diaries that the couple were deeply in love and the latter was an empty vessel which benefited both artistically and emotionally from being filled by the talent and personality that was England’s greatest poet of the last century.

But the circumstances surrounding the last months of Plath’s life, and Ted Hughes’ desire to suppress as much information as possible relating to them, notwithstanding the recent revelations about the difficulty he had in keeping his trousers on, lead one to invariably point a finger or two, or eight, at Hughes.

If he didn’t have anything to hide, why would he have kept his wife’s suicide hidden from their children? He said in the interview with Negev:

“I didn’t know what to tell them about the circumstances of their mother’s death, so I kept quiet. They grew up without knowing she committed suicide.”

Why would he have destroyed the final volume of Plath’s journal, detailing their last three years together? Why would another diary, which every Plath scholar and enthusiast would be desperate to get their hands on, have suspiciously gone “missing”?

Plath was clearly a disturbed character – she had tried to commit suicide before ever meeting Hughes – and, as with almost all suicides, a wide array of factors need to be taken into consideration before attempting to decipher why she had chosen to take her own life.

But Hughes failure to apologize for cheating on Plath with another married woman, his refusal to discuss the circumstances surrounding her death head-on, and the revelations in Feinstein’s biography are sure to ensure he remains the Most Despised Poet on America’s campuses and nothing less than a murderer, albeit a talented one, in the eyes of many Plath sympathisers.

http://1lit.tripod.com/june2001.html

“The Minotaur” by Ted Hughes commentary by Mel Mc Guinness

“The Minotaur” by Ted Hughes
Commentary by Mel Mc Guinness

Minotaur –from Greek mythology, a half man-half beast that feeds on flesh and is found in a labyrinth.

This poem consists of 6 quatrains. It has a fast pace brought about through the use of sparse punctuation coupled with enjambment. The enjambment gives effect to the sudden and swift action within the verse accompanied by the extreme emotions which trigger this action.

There are two personalities on whom the focus is within the poem. While there is also reference to two other people within the poem, viz. Aurelia and Otto Plath, the focal point is the action and dialogue between Hughes and Sylvia Plath. The poem opens with violent action. Plath is represented as being in a fit of rage, smashing Hughes’s mother’s heirloom sideboard. For Hughes, the damage goes beyond the destruction of the physical, as seen in “Mapped with the scars of my whole life”. This could also be interpreted tom imply that he too has emotional childhood ‘scars’.

The second stanza provides the apparent reason for the rage. Hughes arrived home twenty minutes late for baby-minding. The first three lines focus on her actions thus diminishing and down-playing the fact that he was late. There are obvious gaps within the poem and one cannot but wonder why he was in fact late!

The third and fourth stanzas use dialogue which is sharp and sarcastic. These are Hughes’s words within the context of this incident. He ties her anger and violence to her personality rather than to his tardiness, sarcastically suggesting that she fails to include these emotions and destructive tendencies in her poetry. Again Hughes paints himself as the calm, placid one encouraging her in her creative pursuits, “Get that shoulder under your stanzas/ And we’ll be away”. From this point onward the focus changes and there is implied reference to Plath’s father. Otto Plath is described as the goblin which controls Sylvia’s psyche. The image of a “bloody skein” hints at Plath’s connection to her father and the destruction that this has wrought. It is a strong Freudian image conjuring notions of an in tact umbilical cord which strongly connects the two people.

The penultimate stanza utilises the jarring personal pronoun “Your” repeatedly. This creates an accusatory tone through repetition, “your marriage”, “your children”, “your mother”. Hughes has in effect, written himself out of the equation. The use of the simile “Left your children echoing/ Like tunnels in a labyrinth” connects them to the minotaur, their grandfather. This implies that they too have been affected by the ‘ghosts’ of their grandfather who wreaks havoc on Plath. The idea of Otto Plath as a monster or beast is echoed in the final stanza alongside the image of her mother who is seemingly helpless and abandoned. Hughes uses the juxtaposition of ideas in the penultimate line “Grave of your risen father” to foreshadow Plath’s death. The last two stanzas read like an explanation for her death. They imply that her death was a consequence of her manic tendencies and uncontrollable rage. The tone here is fierce and seemingly frustrated.

Ted Hughes~ “Your Paris” commentary by Mel Mc Guinness

“Your Paris” by Ted Hughes

Hughes and Plath visited Paris soon after their 16 June 1956 marriage. This poem alludes to the fact that Paris was a city in recovery from the carnage of WWII. The German army had occupied Paris and the French Resistance had attempted to fight against this. There were also French collaborators (with the Nazis) against whom the French Resistance battled.

The title immediately alerts us to the fact that this is Hughes’s perspective of Plath’s perspective! This is made evident through the use of the word “Your” in the title and our knowledge that this poem is written by him. The poem makes dominant use of contrasting personal pronouns, “you”, “your”, “I” and “my”. These pronouns, when not used, are often implied.

Like the other poems in Birthday Letters, “Your Paris” is written with the benefit of hindsight as well as the advantage of an intimate knowledge of Plath’s Ariel anthology.

The two perspectives presented here are of their differing appreciations of Paris. This is evident in the opening lines, “Your Paris, I thought, was American”. The words “I thought” are another way of saying “in my opinion” or “from my perspective”. In this line he belittles or discredits Plath’s appreciation of Paris. This idea is sharply contrasted with the line, “I kept my Paris from you”. It is implied within the poem that his Paris was much more valid than hers. In short, we see that his appreciation of Paris was definitely vastly different from hers- thus conflicting perspectives.

The speaker describes Plath’s view of Paris as being confined to its iconic image as the centre of art and culture- a romantic view of café life and social entertainment. In lines 3-4 Hughes describes Plath as stepping out of the “Hotel des Deux” in a shatter of exclamations. This is a mockingly sarcastic reference to an implied manic state or ‘highs’ that Plath may have exhibited. Hughes sees these as being a ruse to conceal her melancholy. The symbolic use of the Hotel of Two Continents perhaps hints at the duality of Plath’s personality or the idea that Hughes and Plath were experiencing separate realities.

Hughes describes his Paris as being characterised by the scars of World War II, which for him, were visible not only through the damaged buildings but also through the eyes of people who still ‘wore’ the impact of the devastation on their faces, “ I was a “ghostwatcher”. There is a contrast between the war graves that dominated his conscious appreciation of Paris and the ‘grave’ of her father which dominated her subconscious.

Hughes makes use of extended metaphors and alliteration to establish the tone of the poem. He sets up the contrast of their perspectives through the alliteration in the lines “With an eerie familiar feeling” and “stared at the stricken sunny exposure of pavement”. He argues that his view of Paris was characterised by its obvious post-war character while hers reduced it all to “anecdotal aesthetic”.

Plath is described as speaking in a ‘lingo’ that was personal to her, which he didn’t fully understand. This implies that she used this ‘lingo’ to conceal her true self and her demons, “to protect you from spontaneous combustion”. This suggests that she was volatile and feigned bliss prevented her from completely self-destructing. Hughes stated that her Paris infuriated him ‘diesel aflame / To the dog in me”. In this poem Hughes uses the symbol of a dog to construct an image of himself as loyal and true to her.

The latter part of the poem changes its focus to her father, “your torturer”. He describes Plath as not being complete, using the word ‘flayed’. In a literal sense this means ‘without skin’. This idea is repeated in the poem where earlier she is described as ‘what walked beside me was flayed”. This not only reduces her to an inanimate object (what rather than who) and but she was also skinless. This is a rather grotesque image in a literal sense and is reinforced by “one walking wound that the air/ Coming against kept in a fever”. She is described as ghostly and ghastly all at once. This is all attributed to the impact that her father’s ever-present memory has had on her.

Plath is describes as having intentionally deceived him in the lines, “Your practised lips/Translated the spasm to what you excused/ As your gushy burblings…You gave me no hint”. Again we see the idea that she confused him in that her manner of communication was indecipherable to him. He paints a picture of himself as a victim in these lines, through the use of the word “hopelessly”.

The latter part of the poem paints a picture of two people who are physically together, “My fingers linked in yours” but emotionally distant, “Was a dream where you still hurtled…”. Plath is represented as being emotionally trapped in a nightmare where she still searches for her father, “The Minotaur”.

There is a tonal shift in the last ten lines of the poem. A reflective tone is established through the use of a rhetorical question, “What searching miles / Did you grad your pain”. This is the first reference to the idea that Plath was indeed struggling through, rather than enjoying her mental state. The words “drag your pain” convey the idea of dificulty in contrast to the earlier representation of her in “shatter of exclamations” and “thesaurus of your cries”.

Once again Hughes constructs the image of himself as a loyal dog “happy to protect you”. He compounds this idea with the simile “like a guide dog”. This positions him a s a positive force in her otherwise negative life. The use of the word “stumblings” is more kind that the earlier descriptions of her inadequacies. The poem therefore concludes on a note of peace and calm with Plath being described as capable of calming herself through her pursuit of drawing.

Sylvia Plath: “Daddy” commentary by Mel Mc Guinness

Sylvia Plath ~ “Daddy” has relevance to “The Shot” byTed Hughes

This poem conveys tension from the very outset. It is a confessional poem, in which Plath reveals a love-hate relationship for both her father and Ted Hughes, her husband. The title “Daddy” has positive connotations associated with love, warmth and security. This is sharply contrasted with the first line “You do not do, you do not do”. The tone can be interpreted as insistent because of the repetition but it is also possible to view it as accusatory because of the repetition of the work “not”. When you consider that Plath has used enjambment here, then the opening line must be read to include the first tow words of the second line, “Any more”. This then brings us to the idea that ‘daddy’ is no longer active, hence no longer alive. The speaker then establishes the image of the black shoe. Black is a colour used frequently in this poem and each time the connotations are negative. Plath uses colour to great effect within this poem, “black, white, green, blue, bright blue” and red is implied through the idea of blood.

The image of the speaker living in a black shoe in which she dared not breathe conveys a feeling of restrictions and fear. This is conveyed through the use of the simile in line 3.

The second stanza becomes darker in tone and from this point on the poem descends into proverbial darkness. In this stanza we note that the speaker idolised ‘daddy’ and he is represented as larger than life but in an intrusive and freakish way. He is described through an allusion of him being a seal that stretches from the east to the west. The speaker continues by stating that she longed to recover him “pray”. This however is in the past tense. Thus she is implying that she no longer prays to recover him. Something has changed and this poem gives the reasons for this change.

In the following stanzas, Plath refers to her father’s ancestry. Plath’s mother was Austrian and her father was German. Within this poem she connects his German descent to the holocaust and applies images of him as her persecutor and therefore she sets herself up as his victim- a Jew, “I think I may well be a Jew”. She finds the German tongue unappealing “language obscene” and it is evident that she feels this way about her father in this poem. There is a strong sense of disconnection form her father within this poem, “I have always been scared of you”. The images that are constructed around this notion of her father as a Nazi persecutor and herself as the Jewish victim are symptomatic of her psychotic state. She uses sarcasm to set up the idea of him as a brute, “Every woman adores a Fascist/ The boot in the face, the brute”. There is strong use of the repeated use of the word “brute” which conveys extremes of emotion.

In the stanzas that follow her father is described as a devil and as the devil that destroyed her heart. The idea of him biting her heart is grotesque and inhuman. We discover that she tried to kill herself at the age of twenty in order to be reunited with her father. The description of her recovery implies that she was noever quite the same- it was a temporary fix, “stuck me together with glue”.

There is a turning point in the poem as the focus shifts from ‘daddy’ to the man with the “Meinkampf look”-a reference to Ted Hughes. He is described as having a love of torturing her. She describes him as a vampire who sucked the life from her for seven years. For this reason, she addresses ‘daddy’ telling him that he can now rest because she has a new torturer.

In the final stanza “daddy” and Hughes become one and the same person. These last five lines are loaded with anger, frustration and desperation and speak strongly of her intention to suicide.
In his poem “The Shot” Hughes makes reference to many aspects of this poem and Plath’s “Ariel”.

“Fulbright Scholars” by Ted Hughes

Fulbright Scholars – Ted Hughes
Commentary by Mel Mc Guinness

Subject Matter

This poem is the first in a chronological selection from Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes. It is a representation of his first sighting of the other person addressed in the poem. It explores the poet’s first sighting of Sylvia Plath in a photograph on a newspaper stand at the Strand.
While walking on a hot summer’s day, the speaker passes a news stand displaying the newspaper of the day. He notices the picture of the Fulbright Scholars who were the intake for that year. The assumption in this poem is that Sylvia Plath was one of the students represented in that photograph.
The poem explores Hughes’s memories and reminiscence about that day. In the poem the speaker draws on both memory and hindsight. This creates a tension within the poem, between what he remembers and what he has since learned. For this reason there are conflicting perspectives within this poem. However, one must remember that the poem is merely HIS perspective, his interpretation, his perception of the events of that day and consequently – as inferred within the poem-of their lives together. For this reason it is subjective.

The speaker evokes memories of his thoughts and feelings on this occasion. He remembers some of Plath’s physical attributes like “Your Veronica Lake bang” and “your grin”. He is not always complimentary in his observations, and at times employs sarcasm and disdain, by way of high modality “exaggerated”.

Later in the poem, he remembers buying a peach from a stall near Charing Cross Station. The peach takes on a metaphoric significance within the context of the poem.
It must be noted that the poem is set not long after World War II. The peach therefore also has significance in that luxuries like fruit had started to become available after the war.
The last four lines are very rich in meaning as they operate on more levels than merely the literal.
In a literal sense, not a great deal happens within this poem. However, there is a deeper level of meaning which requires some contextual knowledge of Birthday Letters.

Analysis

The poem opens with a rhetorical question which sets up the tension between the conflicting perspectives of his memories and his hindsight. It is dominated by a tone of questioning and uncertainty made evident through the repeated use of rhetorical questions and the oft used word ‘maybe’. Even the line “For some reason…” evokes a feeling of uncertainty. This is compounded by the repetitive use of the word ‘or’ which is used to mean ‘perhaps’, not to mean an alternative choice.

It reads like a monologue and makes frequent use of personal pronouns which again conveys a sense of subjectivity or personal perspective. There is the obvious contrast of “I” and “you” within the poem which evokes the ever-present debate about their different perspectives on their relationship and the perspectives of so many others, to date. This tension between the two is evident in the “Were you among them? I studied it…”.

The poem moves through a journey from innocence to experience, from being alone to being ‘dumbfounded’. It is noticeable that the speaker remembers some aspects of this experience very clearly, “Noted your long hair…” and yet there is uncertainty about other aspects of the event, “I remember that thought. Not Your face.” From this we can assume that Sylvia Plath definitely was in the photograph and that he did indeed notice her. The use of the word “Noted” has different connotations to the word ‘noticed’. In other words he made a point of remembering these characteristics, viz. her long wavy hair. Almost in the same breath he states that he noted the ‘bang’ and then goes on to state, “Not what it hid”. This implies that she has a secret. It was a case of the obvious concealing the less obvious. He knows this with the benefit of hindsight.
This is further compounded by the use of the word “appear” in the line “It would appear blond”. This raises the notion of appearance versus reality- or indeed the idea of perspective.

The reference to “Your Veronica Lake bang” is loaded with meaning. Veronica Lake was known for assuming the roles of a femme fatale. This leads us to question whether Hughes is implying that Plath was his indeed his personal femme fatale. He furthermore suggests that this “bang” was hiding aspects of her character- that this representation of her was duplicitous.

In the following lines he alludes to her problems, implying that her grin was fake and held a purpose of its own. It was there for the “cameras, the judges, the strangers, the frighteners”. Is the “frighteners” an allusion to the “demons’ that haunted Plath?
The line “Then I forgot. Yet I remember/The picture…: makes judicious use of juxtaposition of the two ideas of forget and remember. It is not clear what exactly he forgot. However, the enjambment of the following lines makes it clear that he remembers the picture but not necessarily all the details of the occasion.
Hughes employs a pun, through the use of the “luggage”. This implies that the Fulbright scholars, esp. Plath, were carrying more thatn just the usual luggage. That as in the case of Plath, there was emotional luggage as well. “It seems unlikely,”hints at the incredulity if the idea that these awarded scholars would have emotional luggage. ON a literal level, it implies that it is unlikely that the photograph would have included their luggage alongside them.
In the final section of the poem Hughes uses alliteration in “”sore-footed, under hot sun, hot pavements”. This evokes the‘s’ sound which is reminiscent of a burning sensation. This evokes a sense of discomfort in the poem. This is followed by a question then a statement, “That’s as I remember”. The combination of the two alongside each other leaves the reader with a feeling of uncertainty and doubt about how sure he really is. We question how much is perspective and how much is conjecture.
The image of the peach hints at the idea in Genesis aka as Adam’s apple, or the fall of man. These lines lead us to believe that Hughes’s interest in Plath was sparked by this picture and in hindsight he now recognises this as the moment which led to his subsequent strife.
Structurally the piece consists only of one stanza. It is a monologue which mimics Plath’s confessional style of poetry.

Module C Conflicting Perspectives- more trivia

Copy the URL into your browser. AN interesting read that spans a few pages.

 

http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-lover-of-unreason-by/

Module C Birthday Letters Tribute to Sylvia and Ted part 2 of 2

Other Related material for Module C “Birthday Letters”

When LOVE looks like WAR

July 14,1861
Camp Clark, Washington DC

Dear Sarah:

The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days – perhaps tomorrow. And lest I should not be able to write you again I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I am no more.

I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing – perfectly willing – to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but omnipotence can break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly with all those chains to the battlefield. The memory of all the blissful moments I have enjoyed with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you, that I have enjoyed them for so long. And how hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes and future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and see our boys grown up to honorable manhood around us.

If I do not return, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I loved you, nor that when my last breath escapes me on the battle field, it will whisper your name…

Forgive my many faults, and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless, how foolish I have sometimes been!…

But, 0 Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they love, I shall always be with you, in the brightest day and in the darkest night… always, always. And when the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath, or the cool air your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for me, for we shall meet again…

---

Sullivan Ballou was killed a week later at the 1st Battle of Bull Run.

http://www.jayandmolly.com/ballouletter.shtml

DULCE ET DECORUM EST₁

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares² we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest³ began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots⁴
Of tired, outstripped⁵ Five-Nines⁶ that dropped behind.

Gas!⁷ Gas! Quick, boys! –  An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets⁸ just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime⁹ . . .
Dim, through the misty panes¹⁰ and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,¹¹ choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud¹²
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest¹³
To children ardent¹⁴ for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.¹⁵

8 October 1917 – March, 1918

These two texts represent conflicting perspectives on the idea of war. In Sullivan Ballou’s letter it is clear that he supports the war and sees it as his duty to be of service. He has a strong belief in his role in this war. It is also clear that his love for his wife Sarah and their sons, is very strong and knows no bounds, other than his love of Country.

He uses many language features like similes, metaphors, alliteration, superlatives and much more. He also uses high modality in his language. You need to examine this text closely to explore the ways in which the reader is positioned and thus influenced by his representation of war.

On the other hand, Wilfred Owen’s poem uses strong visual imagery and auditory cues to ‘transport’ the readers to the battlefields where they ‘witness’ the horrors that soldiers face. Owen also uses high modality in his language.This is intended to show us that it is not “sweet and right to die for your country”. The title of the poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est”, translates into “it is sweet and right”  and the last line “pro patria mori” means ‘ to die for one’s country’. Owen’s statement is anti war. He too uses many poetic devices which you need to closely examine, in order to explore how he positions the reader to understand HIS perspective.

For Jason Safar and the many others who are studying “The Story of Tom Brennan”

book-tom-brennan.htmTeachingSupportKitTheStoryofTomBrennan.pdf

Jason, the chocolates better be good and plentiful!