Kamikaze by Beatrice Garland Flashcards
The poem in a nutshell….
In this narrative poem, Beatrice Garland explores the testimony of the daughter of a kamikaze pilot. Unlike many of his comrades, this pilot turns back from his target and returns home.
The poem vividly explores the moment that the pilot’s decision is made and sketches out the consequences for him over the rest of his life. Not only is he shunned by his neighbours but his wife refuses to speak to him or look him in the eye. His children, too, gradually learn
that he is not to be spoken to and begin to isolate and reject him.
Context
Beatrice Garland was born in Oxford in 1930 and she recalled being forces to read poetry at school if she
misbehaved, but actually quite enjoying it.
During the Second World War, the term ‘kamikaze’ was used for Japanese fighter pilots who were sent on
suicide missions. They were expected to crash their warplanes into enemy warships. The word ‘kamikaze’
literally translates as ‘divine wind’.
‘green-blue translucent’ ‘pearl-grey’
The first section is full of vivid impressions of the senses. There is a semantic field of colour; ‘green-blue translucent’, ‘dark shoals’, ‘flashing silver’ and ‘pearl-grey’. The senses of touch (‘feathery’) and taste (‘salt-sodden’) are evoked. The impressions remind the
pilot he is alive and life is for relishing. There is no mention of the senses in the section of the poem that deals with events after his choice. There is silence and it is ‘as though he had never returned’.
“Her father embarked at sunrise”
The first stanza describes narrator’s father getting ready for the battle, and how he was all embedded for the Kamikaze attack that Japanese used against the US Navy during the World War Two. The use of verb ‘embarked’ in the very first line of this stanza has
double meaning; first to board a plane and second to embark upon a new adventure. This is a willingly done positive connotation, but reading through the whole poem it comes out the word ‘embark’ is suitably used in terms of the relevance of the poem’s theme.
“till gradually we too learned
to be silent, to live as though
he had never returned”
Towards the end of the poem, the “chattering and laughing” of the previous line is silenced. The use of enjambment presents the daughter’s voice as calm, measured language, as though the storyteller is deliberately suppressing or withholding her feelings.
The narrating daughter appears at the end to have become sympathetic to her father’s actions and regretful of the way she, and other family members, shunned her him for what they had initially judged to be a shameful return. This line demonstrates that the speaker finally accepts that the family had condemned
the pilot to a form of living death.
Aspects of Power or Conflict
Central to the poem is the power of society to make individuals conform to its expectations
Internal conflict (the pilot’s internal conflict between carrying out his suicidal duty to society and reacting to the powerful lure of nature)
Conflict between family members
Poems that can be linked
The Émigrée
Poppies
