Humanities Homework Help

I’m working on a literature discussion question and need guidance to help me learn.

After reading the poem, answer the following questions:

–What links do you see between the WWI poems by Sassoon and Owen that we read earlier this semester and the language and depiction of war created in Douglas’s WWII poem? How might Douglas have been influenced by those poets who came before him?

–Choose at least 1-2 lines that stand out to you as particularly vivid. Give the full quote and include your analysis of the significance of those lines.

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

Reply:  
After reading this poem by Keith Douglas, I immediately thought about Sassoon’s poem, “They”. This is because from “They” Sassoon did a really good job with his word choices. With the words he used in his poem, I could see an image and feel those soldier’s pain. So this is why that poem stuck to me to where I was easily able to recall it after reading Douglas’s. These following lines are ones I want to use as my quote and analyze in correlation to this poem:

‘We’re none of us the same!’ the boys reply.

‘For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;

‘Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;

Here, you can tell these boy have been through it. They are complaining to their Bishop about what they have had to do and the results of it. They are basically also speaking on the people they’ve lost and how they are hurting from these events. This is where I make the correlation between both poems. In Douglas’s poem he writes of how long they have endured pain and suffering out in the battle grounds. He elaborates on this one incident that took place with another soldier getting shot in the lungs and how he sees a picture of a girl, whom he assumes is his lover. He then explains how this soldier is dying and how that will affect his lover. How both are feeling different kinds of pain from that incident.