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From the Reviews :http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/india/adigaa.htm "As Balram’s education expands, he grows more corrupt. Y...
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Hamlet’s First Soliloquy Commentary By: Autumn Hamlet’s first soliloquy in Act 1 Scene 2, exemplifies Hamlet’s melancholic behavior...
The first stanza introduces a child to a bayonet, which symbolizes war, cruelty, blood and death. To emphasize the topics of adulthood conflicts such as war, cruelty and death Wilfred Owen chooses to personify the bayonet with demonic human traits such as cold, hungry for blood, starving for flesh. The person representing the bayonet is thus not portrayed as pure but as filled with vices and furthermore experienced or knowledgeable.
ReplyDeleteIn the first line, Owen uses alliteration, the repetition of initial sounds, as a mean to stress the bayonet as a destructive tool "bayonet-blade". In the second line, he also uses assonance, the repetition of vowels, to give accent on the personified traits of the bayonet such "steel" and "keen". The third line has the word "Blue", which possesses a double meaning in this stanza. First, it refers to the coldness of the blade and second it can mean profane or indecent, which alludes, back to experience and knowledge. The third line also contains a simile "like a madman's flash" meaning that the personified bayonet attacks in sudden bursts of insanity, which emphasizes the humanity of the blade and thus reinforces the personification. The fourth line uses alliteration to accent the word "flesh" due to the "F" sound in the words "famishing" and "for". The first stanza has an approximate end rhyme such as "blade" and "blood" or "flash" and "flesh".
The second stanza also has personification. The bullets are represented as heads, which long to be affectionate with a boy's heart. Therefore, the human trait of the bullets is to corrupt the innocence of children and thus making them experienced. To further the personification, Owen, personified the cartridges, which hold the bullet or the powder, as teeth. The teeth are "sharp with the sharpness of grief and death." Death and grief are two human actions and depicts how the teeth are sharp because death is a decisive action and grief is grievance cause by a death.
The fourth line of this poem uses alliteration to emphasize the humanity of the bullets "blind, blunt, bullet-heads". The eighth line also uses alliteration in the repetition of sharp. The second stanza also has an approximate end rhyme such as "heads" and "lads" or "teeth" and "death", which is called consonance: repetition of the final consonant sounds.
The third stanza describes, using metaphors, the boy as innocent. For example, in line nine, "For his teeth seem for laughing round and apple" refers to the pastoral idealization of the non-corruption found in country life.
Line ten, eleven and twelve also depicts the boy as innocent since he does not mirror a demon; he does not have claws under his flexible fingers, or at his feet, nor horns on his head.
Alliteration is also used in the last stanza, in line eleven with the words "God" and "grow", which emphasize the word "God" by repeating the same sound. The last line also has alliteration as internal rhyme with the words "through" and "thickness". The third and last stanza also has an approximate end rhyme such as "apple" and "supple" or "heels" and "curls".