Student Question
What is the theme, imagery, figurative language, and speaker's attitude toward war in "The Gift in Wartime"?
Quick answer:
Tu's "The Gift in Wartime" grieves the futility of war, employing the visual imagery of roses, clouds, and the body of a corpse. She also uses such figurative language as irony, apostrophe, anaphora, and metaphor to make her point. The speaker's attitude toward war is one of sadness and bitter irony.
The theme of Tu's "The Gift in Wartime" is to mourn the sadness and futility of lives lost in war. In the poem, the speaker, who has to face the death of her beloved in a war, speaks directly to him, contrasting what she has to offer him—her lost youth and her lost dreams—to what he has to offer her, his death, his grave, his medals, and his shrapnel.
Tu employs verbal irony in this poem, which is when words mean the opposite of their intended meaning. When she talks about the "gift" in wartime, she is speaking not of a real gift but of grief and loss. A grave and shrapnel as tokens of remembrance are not the kinds of gifts people truly want. In reality, the speaker says, her beloved's "gift" of death has robbed her of her youth:
My youth died away
When they told me the...
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Imagery is description using any of the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, or smell. Tu uses the imagery of roses on the beloved's grave. Since roses are traditionally red, they symbolize both the love of the speaker's beating heart and the blood that the beloved shed for his country. Other imagery includes the picture of the beloved as a corpse: "Lips with no smile," "eyes with no sight," and "your motionless body."
Figurative language includes anaphora, which is the repetition of the same words at the beginning of a line. Tu repeats the ironic "you give me" in stanzas three and five. This anaphora comes to a crescendo in stanza six, when the speaker repeats "you give me" three times in a row, pounding us with the irony of the empty "gifts" of death. The poem also uses the literary device of apostrophe, which is direct address to a person who is not present or to an inanimate object; in this poem, the speaker addresses a corpse. The speaker employs metaphor as well: she likens her sadness to the "clouds" in her eyes on a summer day.
The speaker's attitude towards war is one of bitter irony and sadness at all that it takes from people.