War and Society: A Poetic Exploration

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Life does not always give people what they want is a general saying, but sometimes it can be true. Some circumstances can be beyond one’s control just like the poems that are set in times of war. Nobody truly wants to be in a war, but sometimes people do, to save others life. In the poem of “The Man They Killed” the speaker tries to tell us that if possible he did not want to be in a war because there is no reason for it. “Dulce et Decorum Est” is another wartime poem that the speaker tries to tell us that war is not a glorious thing. In the poem “The Dover Beach,” the speaker explains that the world is a dark place with no ending struggle and fight. In “Patterns” the speaker expresses herself the way the society wants her to be, but on …show more content…

The speaker’s tone at first sounds like everything is beautiful and peaceful and he admires what he sees. “The sea is calm tonight” (p. 498). But later the speaker’s tone changes into sadness as he begins to listen; he hears the grating roar and it seems like the speaker senses that war is in the air. “Listen! You hear the grating roar of pebbles which the waves drawback, and fling,” (p. 498). In the last stanza, the speaker begins to see that the future is frightening and that the world is becoming fearful. The speaker sees that there is nothing left in the world. At first, the speaker sees the world as calm and beautiful, but as soon as he listens and hears the grating roar, sadness came over him. The speaker expresses grief, at last about the world. “To one another! For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; and we are here as on a Darkling plain swept with confused arms of struggle and fight, where ignorant armies clash by night” (p. …show more content…

In the second stanza, the woman shows her emotions. The woman’s tone changes as she sees flowers moving freely while she is not moving freely as she walks through the garden dressed in a stiff, brocaded gown. “I walk down the garden-paths, and all the daffodils are blowing, and the bright blue squills” (p. 370). The speaker describes daffodils and other types of flowers moving freely in the winds. The woman in the poem wishes she can move freely and confidently like the flowers. She was not allowed to show any emotions for her lover who was killed in combat. Society expected some patterns from her, and that is what she did. In the third stanza, the speaker tells us how the woman was angry and frustrated for not allowing her to show any feelings. She does not want to be trapped in her brocaded gown. She wants to be loose. “Underneath my stiffened gown is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin, a basin in the midst of hedges grown so thick, is near” (p. 371). On the inside, she expresses her emotions and what she truly feels. She feels as if there is not softness anywhere about her being confined by whalebone and brocades. The speaker continues to live up to the expectations society enforces upon her. The last stanza the woman sees that that everything in her life is stiff as her brocade. Her patterns cannot be broken as the

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