In this essay I will be writing about two poems: ‘Homecoming’ by Bruce Dawe and ‘Come Up From the Fields, Father’ by Walt Whitman. These poems both combine normal life with war in different ways. Dawe combines war with everyday life by using words that would normally be used to describe people’s normal lives. Whitman combines war with everyday life by setting the poem on a farm. Dawe’s poem, ‘Homecoming’ is satirical and describes the way that the bodies of dead soldiers are taken from Vietnam back to Australia. Even the title is not quite what it seems. The word ‘Homecoming’ represents a joyous event in America with lots of razzmatazz and glamour. In this poem it is completely the opposite: here ‘Homecoming’ describes a degrading and pathetic journey. The title of Whitman’s poem also isn’t exactly as it seems. The title suggests a pleasant poem set in the countryside. As the poem goes on the reader realises this is not the case. Both these authors confuse the reader by writing a title which in no way suggests that the poems will be negative. This contrast from the title to the actual poem shocks the reader and emphasises how terrible each of the situations are.
Whitman and Dawe depict the dead very differently in these poems. Dawe dehumanises the dead and even splits them up into groups according to their hair type: ‘curly-heads, kinky hairs, crew-cuts and balding non-coms’ This disrespectful and emotionless description is far from heroic. On the other hand, Whitman depicts the dead in his poem as heroic: ‘Alas poor boy...that brave and simple soul.’ Although these descriptions are virtually the opposite of each other, they have a similar effect on the poems. They both make the different wars which have caused the deaths seem unimportant and not worth human lives. The structure in these two poems is very different. The structure in ‘Come Up From the Fields, Father’ is very irregular and Whitman makes each sentence a stage in the poem. At the beginning of the...