Have you ever considered the impact of war on our society? Have you considered the futility of its outcome? Famous Australian poets Bruce Dawe and Mary E. Fullerton discuss this themes in two confronting poems about war and the devastating effects it has on our community. The poem Phantasms of Evening written by Bruce Dawe and War Time by Mary E. Fullerton examine the futility of war and death, and the inability of the human race to learn from past mistakes in order to avert future occurrences.
Bruce Dawe’s free verse poem Phantasms of Evening, written in 1978, uses a mixture of simple statements and long sentences with no regular structure to express the jarring feeling of what feels like a never ending war. Dawe uses short sentences to create…show more content… Dawe’s historical links to old battles and modern day wars foregrounds the similarities between them and humanity’s failure to learn from their past mistakes and to prevent further conflicts The inability to decipher between past wars and today’s wars by the author effectively highlights that all war, loss and mourning are the same throughout history and will be seemingly infinite unless humans learn from previous errors that have caused mass conflict in past years. QUOTES - FOOLS WILL YOU NEVER LEARN – can move to the end and talk about the message of both poems – add in quotes moron
As well as Phantasms of Evening by Bruce Dawe, War Time by Mary E. Fullerton also provides a unique insight into the loss and mourning of war. War Time is a free verse poem with a steady rhyme that causes rhythm that mimics that of a bike pedal, what the poem is based on. The caesura in line 10 provides a dramatic pause right before the climax of the poem, that causes the audience to reflect on the bike peddler’s unaffectedness in this time of warfare as contrasted to the narrator’s extreme affectedness by the envelopes of pain…show more content… The language in the first half of every stanza is very cheerful as it explains the postman’s actions. Then in the second half of every stanza it becomes very mournful and sorrowful as it talks about the envelopes of pain (4), that are filled with the names of those have dies in war. Fullerton uses repetition of the brutal metaphor in envelopes of pain (4 & 12) to symbolise those killed in war and how these notices affect those not at waiting for the announcement that there loved ones have died. The anaphora of words of death, of words of doom (11) uses emotive language to position the reader to empathise with the narrator while they wait for the words of death (11) that are delivered in the envelopes of pain (12). The use of this anaphora and metaphor together delivers a strong message of the narrator’s emotions as well as emphasising the amount of death caused by war and its overall
