Stephen Crane's War Is Kind

“War is kind” by Stephen Crane is the perfect example of irony. It also ties many war themes together nicely and is similar to “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, “Drummer Boy of Shiloh”, and “O Captain My Captain” in various underlying ways. Even though it shares themes with other poems, it brings creative views on war onto paper and introduces all of the pains focused on in the other passages into one.

Crane’s poem has many themes, a main one happens to be about the battlefield. A few stanzas in the poem focus on what other soldiers see, experience, and deal with on a day-to-day basis. It also touches on the idea that some generals and higher positions had no problem sending soldiers into battle to die. Some of the scenes described in

the poem are a soldier getting shot, trenches and fields of lifeless bodies, and a man dying and falling off his horse that runs away. Like scenes are described in all three other poems, gruesome deaths.
Extending beyond the direct war, the death of these soldiers affected their families. Crane mentions a weeping maiden, which suggests her lover died in battle. He also mentions a grieving mother and baby. In each stanza Crane tells the sad souls that “War is Kind”. Once again, the poems mentioned earlier in comparison include upset individuals, such as Farquhar's wife or the speaker mourning the captain’s death in “O Captain My Captain”.
The final main theme is patriotism, and all soldiers can be deemed patriotic simply because they fight for their country. However, in this poem, Crane mentions patriotic symbols such as the American flag, but thinks the war is unpatriotic. He infers this by saying the flag is “unexplained”, and he believes this because the flag was carried as a cause to fight, but the soldiers are fighting for no reason.
To summarize, Stephen Crane wrote “War is Kind” as an ironic poem because the civil war killed many citizens and was pointless. It left many people grieving, and had similar themes to other poems of it’s time that revolved around the civil war.