War Poems

• ee cummings, ["i sing of olaf glad  and big"] (1931)
• main point
• anti-war
• plot: Olaf is a conscientious objector, but he gets drafted anyway. He's beaten up and sodomized
• Olaf is braver and more noble than soldiers b/c he stood up for his beliefs
• In some ways therefore he is more American than soldiers who fight
• structure
• stanza one: we learn he is a CO
• stanza two: refuses the colonel's request that he kiss the flag, even after he's beaten up by non-coms
• stanza three: parallel to two, but worse.  Now they sodomize him-- it's like torture, like he is an enemy. but Olaf continues to resist
• stanza four: Olaf dies, and nobody particularly cares
• Stanza five: hopes to see Olaf in heaven because Olaf was so brave and stood up for what he believed.
• tricky bits
• parts that are hard to read and understand often tell of bad things being done to Olaf; it is as if the military brass is speaking double-talk to hide what is happening
• important passages
• connections with other works

 
• Denise Levertov, "Advent" (1970)
• main point
• objection to Vietnam as death of innocents
• her poetic sight is blurred-- she can't see beauty because all she can see is death
• structure
• tricky bits
• important passages
• connections with other works
• turning into an insect will tie into theme of becoming a machine
• James Dickey, "The Performance" (1957)
• main point
• about a soldier who was executed in WWII
• incorporates themes about brutality, insantiy of war, inevitability of death
• miracle would have been the Japanese seeing that DA was a human being
• structure
• poet re-imagines the death of his friend so as to make that death noble and a free choice
• first stanza is about him seeing DA and moving to put him in the center of the sun
• Last five stanzas are him re-imagining the death as a performance where DA totally blew his captors' minds.
• tricky bits
• odd reversals of meaning that come at end of lines, where line seems to mean one thing and then reverses at the beginning of the next line.
• important passages
• connections with other works

 
• James Dickey "The Firebombing" (1966)
• main point
• structure
• story of a bombing raid on a town in Japan intercut with his own judgements about what he did
• tricky bits
• German epigraph-- "Think on it then, that after the great destruction, every man thought that he was not guilty"
• 184-- "not atoms these" "Apotheosis"
• 186 -- "this detachment":
• important passages
• "I did not think of my home then..." -- his identification with the people he dropped bombs on
• "technical moinded stranger" --  man/machine theme: he has become the machine; it's not like he is really doing anything
• 187- "my body covered with flags" -- again theme of him becoming the plane; patriotism
• connections with other works
• like SH5 in that there is a both a suburban and a war plot, and the poem is about remebering the war and trying to come to terms with it in the present