Dec 17, 2009

The War Correspondent | Themes

War’s Destruction and the Beauty of Nature

A theme that runs through the seven-poem sequence is the juxtaposition of opposites: destruction caused by war and disease and the ever-renewing beauty of nature. This is first hinted at in the last stanza of “Gallipoli”; the final image to describe the reality of that city is “soldiers lie dead or drunk among the crushed flowers.” In that image, the beauty of flowering nature is overwhelmed by the folly of men, either through war or the escape from it in drunkenness. The image is echoed in “Balaklava,” one of three poems in...