The Life of Thomas Albert Crawford
Thomas Albert Crawford was a soldier in the fifteenth Durham Light Infantry. He joined the army when he was eighteen years old. He fought in and survived some of the worst battles, such as the battle at Loos. On the first of July 1916, he was in the middle of the Battle of the Somme, when a bullet hit his rifle, and gave him a serious injury. He was discharged due to his physical condition. He then returned to North East England, where he had grown up. Whilst working night shifts at a Scottish Power Station, he wrote his memoir, a story about the daily life in the trenches. His wife died of cancer, and both his sons died before turning thirty-five. He re-married, and had two sons. Their names were Colin and Brian. Colin died when he was twenty-five. Tommy died shortly thereafter. Brian published his dad’s memoir in 2006, and called it “Tommy”.
Sources
http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/the-stretcher-bearer/ http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/item/5717 THE STRETCHER BEARER by Thomas Albert Crawford
My stretcher is one scarlet stain,
And as I tries to scrape it clean,
I tell you what – I’m sick of pain,
For all I’ve heard, for all I’ve seen;
Around me is the hellish night,
And as the war’s red rim I trace,
I wonder if in Heaven’s height
Our God don’t turn away his face.
I don’t care whose the crime may be,
I hold no brief for kin or clan;
I feel no hate, I only see
As man destroys his brother man;
I wave no flag, I only know
As here beside the dead I wait,
A million hearts are weighed with woe,
A million homes are desolate.
In dripping darkness far and near,
All night I’ve sought those woeful ones.
Dawn suddens up and still I hear
The crimson chorus of the guns.
Look, like a b...
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...om, but all that he can see is how men are murdering their fellow men.
As he is watching thousands upon thousands of men die, he isn’t rebelling or protesting. Instead, he bears all the suffering men’s “woe” on his shoulders/conscience. He portrays this as his stretcher. The poet says that there are now “a million homes (that) are desolate”, because so many innocent lives have been wasted.
The poet describes the darkness in which he sees all these young men and boys as “dripping darkness”. He watches and searches for all these poor souls until it is daytime. He describes the sun as a “ball of blood” that is constantly and mercilessly present over “the scene of wrath and wrong”.
Someone shouts “Quick! Stretcher-bearers on the run!”, and the poet wonders out loud how long must this suffering and devastation continue before God decides to intervene, and end it all.
Dialectical Journal:. Passage Response "He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness is implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running.
“Maybe it was / because the only time / I hit a baseball / it smashed the neon cross / on the church across / the street” (1-6). The readers are clearly presented with a scene of a boy playing baseball and accidentally breaking a church cross. The boy then explores and toys with the possible divine consequences for accidentally breaking a cross with a baseball. “Maybe it was the demon-stoked / rotisseries of purgatory / where we would roast / hundreds of years / for the smallest of sins” (11-15). Here the poet effectively uses imagery to show the reader how a child’s imagination may perceive hell. This may also show the impressionability of the Church on a freethinking child and how the combination can be profound on a young boy with internal conflicts. This can also apply to children’s fantasies and their carefree attitudes which allows them to blend what mindsets they were forced into with that of their
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
I think the main idea the narrators is trying to emphasize is the theme of opposition between the chaotic world and the human need for community with a series of opposing images, especially darkness and light. The narrator repeatedly associates light with the desire to clear or give form to the needs and passions, which arise out of inner darkness. He also opposes light as an idea of order to darkness in the world, the chaos that adults endure, but of which they normally cannot speak to children.
Imagery uses five senses such as visual, sound, olfactory, taste and tactile to create a sense of picture in the readers’ mind. In this poem, the speaker uses visual imagination when he wrote, “I took my time in old darkness,” making the reader visualize the past memory of the speaker in “old darkness.” The speaker tries to show the time period he chose to write the poem. The speaker is trying to illustrate one of the imagery tools, which can be used to write a poem and tries to suggest one time period which can be used to write a poem. Imagery becomes important for the reader to imagine the same picture the speaker is trying to convey. Imagery should be speculated too when writing a poem to express the big
His outside actions of touching the wall and looking at all the names are causing him to react internally. He is remembering the past and is attempting to suppress the emotions that are rising within him. The first two lines of the poem set the mood of fear and gloom which is constant throughout the remainder of the poem. The word choice of "black" to describe the speaker's face can convey several messages (502). The most obvious meaning ... ...
“These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darkness’s, the darkness of their lives, which were now closi...
The man in the poem searches for an asylum from the world’s chaos, but only finds anxiety and disharmony. Like the man in the poem, humanity faces a never-ending search for a sanctuary from disquiet and decisions. Mankind fears the choices to be made and pines for tranquility. Brooks presents this struggle in her poem, “The Explorer”, and uses figurative language, diction, and structure to expound on this. Mankind’s search, however, is less lyrical and not narrated with poetic devices.
The reader gets a vivid image of a huge industrial city built in “valleys huge of Tartarus”(4). This reference to Tartarus is saying that the city is virtually in a hell-like area. The image of hell is further exemplified by the line “A flaming terrible and bright”(12), which conjures up thoughts of fire and heat. The reference to hell and flames adds to the theme because it brings to light the idea of destruction and nature burning away. Similar to what happens when there is a forest fire. The fire is not just coming out of nowhere though, it is coming “from out a thousand furnace doors”(16), which furthers the idea of industrialization. There are no longer humans in this city which is evident because when talking about the beings in the city Lampman wrote “They are not flesh, they are not bone,/ They see not with the human eye”(33-34). This part of the poem is important because if there are no more humans left it is easy to assume that the only driving force of these “Flit figures that with clanking hands”(31) is work. They work to make the city bigger and to build more than they already
“A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways- by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize the same thing happens to the soul” (Plato 3). In a literal meaning, the term dark is defined as, “with little or no light,” and the term light is defined as, “the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible” (Dictionary.com). However, when used in a piece of work, such as this one, darkness and light can be associated with an endless amount of meanings. For instance, by using imagery, any author can write a story about one event that’s happening, but have a deeper, more meaningful message that isn’t so straightforward. For example, in both Oedipus the King and “The Allegory
...er swell of those familiar tones, heard daily in the sunshine, at Salem village, but never, until now from a cloud of night.? (202) The use of light and dark imagery in this particular sentence helps you understand Goodman Brown?s despair. He has realized the truth that the people he sees in the daylight hours pretending to be pure and good are the total opposite in the dark.
... wars and deaths of loved ones, or like those in a Greek tragedy, but the writer of this poem is so sincerely affected by sorrow and tragedy that it permeates his daily life, to the point where the death of a toad during the mowing of a lawn is seen as something moving and serious.
The poem altogether is divided into four stanzas; however, the second and third stanzas appear to be connected to one another as together, their rhyme scheme is consistent with the rest of the stanzas. Owen’s choice to split the stanza into two parts mirrors the fragmented society of his day: the war-torn soldiers and the sheltered civilians. These usages of ...
Philip Larkin share his thoughts on illness and death in his work which includes the poem “Ambulances” and “Aubade”. In “Ambulances” Larkin convey the fact that human must all face death sooner or later. The poem is depressing and the title itself suggests something saddening. Larkin first gives relation to the everyday world by beginning the poem describing ordinary folks doing ordinary things. The imagi...
“The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” (96)