War Photographer Flashcards
Spools of suffering
Sibilance/Alliteration
Disturbing images
Plural emphasises scale of the suffering
he is ‘finally’ alone
His life as a war photographer is chaotic.
Dark room is a place of quiet isolation.
He is now glad he is alone
set out in ‘ordered rows’
Attempt to impose order to the chaos of war
as though this were a church and he a priest preparing to intone a mass
simile
he is delivering a morale or spiritual message to his audience
did not tremble then thought seem to now
return of trauma from the war zone
he has a job to do.
caesura
matter of fact tone - but it is not just a job.
it has a phycological impact
rural england.
caesura
emphasises the juxtaposition of the peaceful isolation of rural england and horrific environment of war. War photographer finds this disorientating
‘ordinary’ pain
adjective
implies that in warzones the pains he has seen are extraordinary and are complex to end the pain.
‘children’
emotive and shocking to the reader as they are innocent
…beneath the ‘feet’
…nightmare ‘heat’
rhyming couplet emphasises chaos
rhymes like a nightmarish version of children’s nursery rhyme
compares the level of suffering between the 2 places and the level of injustice of the suffering towards children in war zones
‘nightmare heat’ could reference napalm
a half formed ‘ghost’
metaphor
1) negative of the image is white like a ghost an half formed
2) the photos are haunting him
3) the subject is dead now so effectively a ghost
the war photographer is almost resurrecting the dead with these photos
to do what someone ‘must’
modal verb
feels it’s his duty to inform the readers about the horrors of war
he struggles morally-
he is powerless to help and feels guilty that it may be exploitive to photograph their grief and suffering
and how the blood ‘stained’ into foreign dust
verb
1) there is so much bloodshed that it has stained
2) the war photographer will never get rid o the images in his head
his editor will pick out ‘five or six’
contrasting use of number
hundreds of images of agony but the pubic will only see 5 or 6
the public have a limited view of the war from carefully edited images, they don’t see the scale of it
‘sunday’s supplement’
implies the suffering of people is less important than the news in the main newspaper
with ‘tears’ between bath and pre lunch ‘beers’
internal rhyme
emphasises the publics emotional reaction is brief before they enjoy the rest of their day
contras to psychological impact of war on the war photographer
he stares ‘impassively’ at where
adverb
implies he has to emotionally detach himself to function as war photographer
and ‘they’ do not care
3rd person plural pronoun
we as readers of the poem are the public
makes us reconsider our own response to global suffering
‘from aeroplane’
flying from warzone to another
implies that war is constant somewhere in the world
duffy emphasises the pity of this in her poem
4, 6 line stanzas each ending in a rhyming couplet
orderly poetic structure that contrasts with chaos of subject matter (war)
