Wednesday, April 27, 2016

World War I Weeping Poems Sung-Sophie

 

In “In Flanders Fields” the poet John McCrae depicts the lose of soldiers during World War I and poppies that grow around them. This poem is written in first person of the soldiers in Flander fields view, and uses literary devices to convey the message. This poem effectively evokes emotions of melancholy about war heroes, which illuminates reader on deaths and inspires other soldiers to fight.

Cheerless Poetic Devices
This poem has poetic devices used to convey the overall message such as rhyme, personification and euphemisms.

Rhyme in the first stanza is,” In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row,” and through the entire poem, but these lines also have imagery describing Flanders field after the soldiers died.  “We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.” uses repetition from the first line, and shows symbolism of poppies for peace.

Personification is present in the lines “The larks, still bravely singing, fly” where the larks are personified to have human emotions. Lastly this poem uses euphemism for death by saying “sleep”, a respectful way of referring to death.

Grief-Stricken Themes/Issues
This poem pays tribute to fallen soldiers and the themes of death and life help illuminate the issue of war. Death is present when the reader becomes aware of the narrator's status, but also uses that to conveys life. The issue is war causes pain even if based on peace.

Woeful Message
The main message from “In Flanders Field” is to fight for your rights, even if you lose someone, because they are counting on you to make their sacrifice worthwhile. Furthermore the message could also be peace isn’t in death, it’s in loyalty.



There is no War, no fight, but are you a poppy?




1 comment:

  1. I really liked your analysis of the poem, especially in terms of identifying its poetic devices. (Interestingly, aside from peace, poppies usually stand for sleep and death as well - sleep for the opium that can be extracted from them and death for their blood-red colour. They were also offerings to the dead in Greek and Roman myths.) I don’t agree entirely with your interpretation of the poem’s message, however - I don’t think the last stanza or the poem had anything in particular to do with rights, but instead expresses a message to new soldiers (kind of telling them to not be intimidated by the death of those before them? Like a ‘Do not be frightened and abandon our efforts’ kind of thing.)

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