Shooting Stars

Shooting Stars

  • Submitted By: erinb
  • Date Submitted: 03/14/2009 4:58 AM
  • Category: Miscellaneous
  • Words: 1156
  • Page: 5
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26/11/08 “SHOOTING STARS” BY CAROL ANN DUFFY ERIN BURDEN

In this essay I will show how the poem “Shooting Stars” depicts a cruel and horrific image of war through structure, tone, mood, theme and poetic techniques.
The poem is written by Carol Ann Duffy and it is set in a World War two concentration camp, probably Germany or Poland. The narrator is a persona created by Duffy. We get the impression that the narrator is female.
Duffy shows how cruel and heartless people were in the war, specifically soldiers towards civilians in concentration camps, using many poetic techniques. She lists people’s names that are due to be shot, “Rebecca Rachel Ruth Aaron Emanuel David,” The lack of commas or any punctuation suggests that the list of names could continue meaning many more people are to be killed. Also within this line the names that are given are Jewish. This is the first sign or clue we get that these people are being punished for being Jewish suggesting a World War two concentration camp as this is a significant time in history where the Jews were murdered for their beliefs.
The idea that that it is about the negative side of war is similarly portrayed through repetition, “Remember Remember, those appalling days” the repetition signifies importance, or urgency to remember what happened, possibly to prevent it happening again. There is also effective word choice here “Appalling” suggests the extent to which the conditions were unacceptable. We can see this As Duffy could have used a simpler term here but instead uses a word that shows extremely bad conditions
Later in the passage another very effective technique is used, when the narrator talks about a solider loosening his belt. It might be to hit the narrator with, but the next line suggests something else; “my bowels opened in a ragged gape of fear” If we use letter inversion for the words “ragged” and “gape” they become “gagged” and “rape” portraying the other reason the solider was loosening his...

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