AQA Power and Conflict: Kamikaze

This poem, by Beatrice Garland,  explores the idea of choice and conflict in warfare, and examines the emotional traumas that war creates, carried down through the generations. Interestingly, as the title suggests, it looks at war from the viewpoint of a Japanese kamikaze pilot, an unusual subject for a western writer. 

The pilot in question has failed to carry out his mission, and is ostracised by his community, even his wife, as a result. The poem examines the ways in which cultural expectations of courage and sacrifice in war can be disabling. You can read the poem on Garland's website, which offers additional interesting information about the poet, her work, and her context.

'Kamikaze' is framed as a simple narrative, with the frame of a story within a story, imagining a woman telling a story about her father. Little hints throughout the poem remind us of this narrative distance, which thus distinguishes between the narrator's perspective, and the direct speech of the mother. Interestingly, in the copy of the poem on the BBC Bitesize site, the italicisations on the original (seen in Garland's website) are not reproduced. This is a pity, as the italicised portions of the poem make clear where the poem is reflecting the direct speech of the mother telling the story, and where the story is seen as filtered through the eyes of its listeners, adding a depth and subtlety to the layered narration. It's an interesting example of why details such as italicisation matter. (See what I did there?)

Before looking at the poem it's worthwhile reflecting on what a kamikaze pilot was, and why they existed. The phrase kami kaze 神風 means 'divine/spirit wind', and indicates something of the spiritual nature of the role. Wikipedia will give you a useful introduction, but in brief, kamikaze pilots were a small and select group, employed by the Japanese in the closing stages of World War 2, whose purpose was to carry out suicide missions, generally involving crashing their explosive-laden planes into a larger target, such as a warship, and so inflicting great damage upon it.  You can see footage of a kamikaze attack in the video above to give you an idea of what it involved. 

Pilots who were selected to be kamikaze pilots were treated with great honour, and the prestige of serving the emperor in this way was thought to more than compensate for the sacrifice of one's own life. Some authorities think that the idea of kamikaze flights arose from situations where pilots flying crippled warplanes decided to crash into a target so as to inflict maximum damage, in a situation where they felt that they were unlikely to survive in any case--this was something done by pilots on all sides. The Japanese also had a tradition of seppuku, or voluntary suicide, where taking one's own life was seen to be an honourable act, and this may have made the idea of kamikaze easier to develop in cultural terms. In contrast, in most western cultures, suicide was seen as a grave sin, and one which brought dishonour in itself, so the idea of voluntary suicide in a non-fatal battle situation would have been harder to justify. The Guardian's article 'How they Cheated Death', which features interviews with two surviving kamikazes, is well worth reading in this context.

The poem consists of seven stanzas of six lines each, varying in length, generally unrhymed, with some notable exceptions where rhyme or half-rhyme at the end of a line draws attention to key words (for instance ‘history/sea’, ‘swathes/safe’). It has lines ranging from six syllables to twelve, and is written in an informal, conversational style that mimics the recounting of a story, in three long sentences. The final two stanzas, and a line from the fifth, are italicized, so as to reinforce the sense that this is an account, a twice-told story that has been passed down through the family.

The first stanza characterizes the father through a list of items that he takes with him on his mission, both practical (a flask of water…enough fuel’) and symbolic (‘a samurai sword …a shaven head …powerful incantations’), almost as though he was leaving from the village itself. The dual nature of his ‘one way’ mission is thus immediately clear—he is like a Samurai warrior of old, trained and skilled, knowing that he must sacrifice himself, yet also he is a pilot of a modern machine, thinking about fuel levels as he considers his quest towards an honourable suicide.

The juxtaposition of these images highlights the curious nature of the kamikaze cult at the end of the war—the soldiers were taught to think of themselves as warriors, with a special code of dedication and sacrifice that linked to the Samurai tradition, and encouraged to believe that they would be making 'history' through their sacrifice.  The detail of bringing a samurai sword with them on the mission is historical. As The Guardian article reveals, there was huge pressure to fulfil the mission: “We didn’t think too much [about dying],” Horiyama said. “We were trained to suppress our emotions. Even if we were to die, we knew it was for a worthy cause. Dying was the ultimate fulfillment of our duty, and we were commanded not to return. We knew that if we returned alive that our superiors would be angry.”

In the face of this weight of expectation it is interesting that the crucial decision in the poem--the decision to turn back (which must have been made 'half-way' , given that the pilot has only enough fuel for 'a one-way/journey') is not explained. The substance of the poem--the reflection on the beauty of the sea, and the beauty of everyday life in a fishing village--is actually conjectural, signalled by 'she thought' and 'he must' in the second stanza. In other words, the mother has not actually discussed with her father his reasons for returning, or has not heard from him why he made this crucial decision. There is something deeply touching about the idea of the mother imagining her father's motivations in this way, and it tenderly also emphasises her actual distance from him, and her lack of knowledge of his real motivations.

The central part of the poem creates vividly the ordinary life that the pilot has left behind. The vivid similes of the fishing boats ‘like bunting’ and fish ‘like a huge flag’ connote gaiety and celebration—though the image of the flag is also reminiscent of the national flag, and so reminiscent of duty to his country. Perhaps here the sheer size of the ‘flag’ of fish outweighs the nationalism that he has been taught. It seems to be signalling to him, as though waved in a figure of eight, perhaps as a warning, and it is this image, the speaker theorises, which calls him home.

The lifegiving image of the fish ‘flashing silver’ is emphasised by the ways in which they are described almost like a radar beacon, ‘swivelled towards the sun’. The image of the sun, of course, has powerful connotations for the Japanese, as the kanji which represent the name of their country, 日本,  also means ‘sun origin’, leading to the name of ‘Land of the Rising Sun’ and their flag represents the sun. So here it is as if the natural world recognizes a deeper priority than the training the pilot has had, one which responds to the land and its people, and so succeeds in calling him back. The soft rhymes ‘swathes/eight/safe’ emphasise this connection between what he sees and what he does.

The vivid memory of the children on the seashore—the pilot and his brothers—building cairns of stones that seemed to summon back his father from sea becomes lyrical, the stones described in terms of precious jewels, and the descriptions of the fish richly metaphorical: ‘cloud-marked’, ‘feathery’. There is a semantic field of wealth here also, building from the ‘pearl-grey pebbles’, through ‘loose silver’ to ‘the dark prince’ of the tuna fish. The devotion of the brothers, and their silent prayers for their father's safe return influence the pilot's decision, it is suggested, which heightens the irony of what awaits his own return.

The endstopped ‘dangerous’ at the end of stanza five seems to predict the consequences of the pilot’s decision to turn back to this rich life, and the language becomes immediately changed to reflect the reaction to this decision, with a repeated string of negative words: ‘though…never…. nor… no longer.. never… no longer’ describing what happens once he returns to his village.  The behaviour of the pilot's wife seems almost to mimic the behaviour of a deferential, traditional Japanese wife: 'never spoke again /in his presence, nor did she meet his eyes', but it becomes clear how this is actually a brutal exclusion 'as though he no longer existed'. As the children ‘gradually’ pick up the adult response, the pilot becomes increasingly isolated, the ‘chattered and laughed’ that finishes the penultimate stanza silenced in the next, the half-rhyme ‘laughed/learned/loved’ accentuating the shift from past happiness to  present misery.

The gradual silencing even of the children illustrates how children learn cruelty from adults and well as kindness. The natural spontaneous joy they feel is 'educated' out of them as they 'learned / to be silent, to live as though / he had never returned'. Although this is a very historically specific moment that is being described, there's a sense in which Garland speaks here also of any parent who has in some way let down their spouse--adult feelings are transferred to children, who then feed then back to parents in a terrible form of punishment. The kamikaze pilot has down something of which we imagine we should be proud--saved his own life and returned to the family he loves more than his reputation--and yet this is seen as shameful and selfish. This alienation of the father is expressed as though it were a failing in him: 'this / was no longer the father we loved', suggesting the ways in which social disappointment transforms character: as the father is treated as being unlovable, so he actually becomes unlovable, 'as though he no longer existed'. 

The final thought of the poem is accentuated by the parenthetical ‘she said’, as though distancing the perception from the narrator. The bitterness of the reflection ‘which had been the better way to die’ emphasises the pain of the pilot’s return, not to find gladness at his escape, but to discover shame at his choice, and so accentuates the damage of the war for all concerned. Of course, the final irony is that he has avoided 'respectable' suicide in order to suffer a different kind of suicide. His actions have condemned him, so that he is slowly killed by the lack of love from his family.

AQA Power and Conflict: The Emigrée

This poem, by Carol Rumens, is taken from her 1993 collection 'Thinking of Skins'. It describes, in the first person, the situation of a person who has left their native land for reasons that are not made clear, and who romanticises the image of their native city.

The title indicates the focus on a single speaking voice. An emigrée would normally be someone who has left their own country unwillingly, perhaps because of political pressure, or economic reasons. It was first used popularly to refer to French people who left France as a result of the 1789 revolution; refugees from the French Revolution in eighteenth-century England were known as 'émigrés' rather than refugees.The rather old-fashioned and refined term both indicates that it is a female speaker (the male form is émigré), and suggests times past. Although it is often used as an equivalent for words such as 'migrant', the term implies perhaps more choice about the manner of leaving than the use of 'refugee' would suggest. In strictly etymological terms, the word suggests more agency--a refugee seeks refuge, an emigre leaves or migrates from their country.

The poem has three stanzas in a rough pentameter, imitative of the speaking voice, of eight, eight and nine lines each. There is not a clear rhyming-scheme, but there are occasional half-rhymes that rely on assonance for their effect, such as 'break / weight', and sometimes end-rhymes, as for instance in the final stanza (city/me/city), create a striking effect when they occur. The repetition of 'sunlight' in the final line of each stanza has a slightly deadening effect, and the repetition is a slightly heavy-handed way of reiterating the central theme of the poem. The patterns are more stressed than syllabic, with between ten and thirteen syllables, but five clear stresses in each line. Although many of the lines show enjambement, this is not immediately evident, with lines often appearing end-stopped at first reading (for example 'I left it as a child / but my memory of it..' or 'my city takes me dancing through the city / of walls'. This creates a curiously multi-layered effect, as though the speaker is constantly adding on ideas and explanations to her original statements. In the final stanza it gives the effect of a final word, as the concluding 'extra' line seems to answer and reject the negativity of the preceding lines.

The start of the poem creates a sense of childlike innocence with the narrative gambit ‘There once was a country’. The inverted syntax and ellipsis powerfully suggest the conventional ‘once upon a time’ formulaic opening to a fairytale. This opens out the key contrast between the poem, between the darkness and struggle suggested by the semantic field of war, with the implicit and symbolic winter suggested by ‘that November / which…comes to the mildest city’, and the enchanted world of the child’s memory, illustrated by images that suggest toys, such as ‘the bright, filled paperweight’ or  the ‘hollow doll’ or paper plane. This contrast is enacted by the opposition between the repeated, positive image of ‘sunshine’ (the repetition of ‘of sunlight’ at the end of each stanza is a use of the rhetorical figure known as epistrophe) and the negative semantic field that opposes it.

Words such as ‘war’, ‘tyrants’ and ‘tanks’ undermine the idealistic ‘sunlight-clear’ memory, and suggest that the child knows that their memory is fantastical and unreliable, even as she clings to it.  The repetition of the provisional ‘may’ in ‘it may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants’ foreshadows the inevitable ‘but’ that follows. Regardless of the reality of the city, its metaphorical illness, the memory of happiness is a ‘brand’ that cannot be forgotten. Ironically the negative word 'brand' is here used to imply a positive--perhaps suggesting the ways that even apparently negative experiences can be positive if they are linked strongly to something highly valued.

In the second stanza, the 'tanks' of war are seen as objects--perhaps even toys-- owned by a personified time, which roll through the city. Despite the 'tanks of time' flattening memory, and the barriers this creates, the memory of the city is seen as 'even clearer', idealised with a 'glow  in recollection. The speaker has been absent from her homeland for such a long time that she has only 'a child's vocabulary' which she worries may be inaccurate--'a lie, banned by the state'. Nonetheless it persists, in much the same way as language persists in Sujata Bhatt's 'Search For My Tongue'. The image of the hollow doll, like a Russian doll, containing within it many smaller dolls, suggests something smuggled out of the country, the image of 'every coloured molecule' making the memory of language seem like a drug or sweet that is attractive to the taste--something picked up in the final line of the stanza. The 'mother tongue' of the speaker cannot be removed, and in a synaesthetic reference 'tastes of sunlight'.

In the final stanza, it is made clear that the exile is unable to travel back to their homeland, perhaps because of political or practical reasons, 'I have no passport'. The city, though, is then personified as something that comes to the speaker 'in its own white plane...docile as paper'. In an effect known as zeugma, the author here has made both the city and the plane possible referents for the phrase 'docile as paper'--the image of the paper plane, or the paper city (with its 'white streets') perhaps includes the paper on which this poem is written. Paper becomes an agent of memory.

The personified city seems almost like a pet (or a doll?) that the speaker tends to: 'I comb its hair and love its shining eyes', and this peaceful domestic image of calmness contrasts with what is probably really happening to the childhood city. In the final lines of the poem we discover indeed that it has become a 'city / of walls', threatening. 'They' in l.6 of the final stanza may refer to the walls, but equally may refer to a mysterious 'they' who accuse the speaker of abandonment. As such, 'they' may represent all the children who did not escape the city before 'that November'. The dancing child consoled by her happy memories is nonetheless circled by walls, or other children, a threatening gang who repetitively 'accuse' her of 'being dark in their free city'. The darkness here is of course a strong contrast to the 'sunlight' with which the speaker surrounds herself, and may suggest an element of Orwell's 'doublethink', in that her accusers accuse her of being 'dark', say that the city is 'free' while acting as though they are oppressive and restrictive, and threatening death.

The personified city is sheltered by the speaker in the face of this threat against memory: 'my city hides behind me'. The implication here is surely that even if the memory that the child cherishes is false to the way that the city now is--even if the city is in fact full of people angrily proclaiming freedom, furious at emigrees who have 'abandoned it', over-run with tanks and 'sick with tyrants', that nonetheless, what the child cherishes is in fact more true to her homeland's spirit than its current condition. In the final, complex image, as 'they mutter death' it is as though the city behind her glows brightly again, casting a shadow onto 'them' and throwing back the accusation of 'being dark'. The shadow is 'evidence of sunlight', just as perhaps, the sadness and threat is also evidence of a brighter future embedded in the memory of a brighter past 'of sunlight'.

The poem was one of those chosen for the 'Poetry by Heart' project and you can see a copy of it, and some further information about it on the 'Poetry by Heart' website. This interview by Lidia Vianu gives some additional context for the poem that you may find helpful, and Carol Rumen's own website also gives some additional context to her work which you may find interesting.

AQA Power and Conflict: 'Tissue'

'Tissue' comes from Imtiaz Dharker's volume The Terrorist at my Table, and like many of the poems in that collection, it deals with issues of perception and bias, focused on how we use language. In this instance, Dharker seems focused especially on ideas of naming and explores the different resonances of the word 'tissue' so as to explore a wide range of ideas through a series of extended images that build up throughout the poem. Dharker’s wider poetic themes are often concerned with transparency, with barriers to understanding, with how we may ‘see through’ things or see them differently from a different perspective. The image of ‘tissue’ is a powerful one for her, uniting as it does the idea of flesh and the idea of paper, and focusing on how light has a transformative effect. 

The first sense of the word ‘tissue’ in the dictionary, or if you look it up online—certainly the first sense that pops up in a Google search—is now usually the biological sense—meaning the material with which living things are made. However, in an etymologically based dictionary, you will tend to see first the oldest sense of the word, meaning fabric, and this will be related to its origin in Old French ‘tissu’ (woven) ultimately coming from Latin ‘textere’ meaning to weave. This is the same origin as our modern word ‘text’, something of which it is unlikely Dharker is unaware. In one sense, then, we are immediately talking about text as soon as the word ‘tissue’ is mentioned. The third sense of the word is that of paper, specifically a thin, fine paper used often for wrapping or packing.

  

The poem is written in quatrains of roughly equal length—mostly iambic, though not consistently. There us no rhyme-scheme, though some assonance and alliteration seems to hold the verse together to some extent. Generally, though it is a conversational, informal style of poem, characterized by enjambment as it imitates the musings of a speaker, softening and blurring the lineation.  The direct address throughout ‘you’, ‘your’ helps to create this sense of an intimate poetic conversation.

As with any word, the immediate sense of the word in the title for any reader will depend on the context. In a laboratory or operating theatre, it would be biological. If you were at a costume designer’s, perhaps you would expect it to refer to glittering material. In a gift shop it would refer to wrapping paper. The title gives no clues as to which meaning we should prioritise, but Dharker immediately captures and defines the title’s meaning in her first word of the poem, removing any initial ambiguity and tying it down to ‘paper’, specifically transparent paper ‘that lets the light / shine through’.

This first sense of the word ‘tissue’, fragile paper, is then explored, as Dharker discusses how it might be paper that is ‘thinned by age or touching’ (so not manufactured tissue paper). This leads on to a discussion of old paper, ‘well-used’ and the way in which this kind of thin paper might be found in texts such as the Koran. Dharker links this powerful cultural reference with the idea of family—names, she suggests, may be written in the back of the Koran as they would be in the front of a family Bible in the West, so as to record the history of a family, giving birth and death dates for its members. The ‘tissue’ of pages and of bodies ‘the height and weight’ is here linked in a single image—and of course may further link with the original material used for old manuscript book pages, which was vellum, or calfskin—both tissue in a literal sense of skin, and tissue-like in its thinness and transparency.

In stanza four, Dharker introduces a playful idea: ‘if buildings were paper, I might /feel their drift’. The idea of paper buildings inspires wordplay, as she punningly describes how she could ‘feel their drift’. The idea of a building made of paper seems at first paradoxical, as it seems to act against the idea of strength; Dharker seems here to be suggesting that there is strength to be found in fragility. In Japan, building partitions are made of paper, and she may be thinking of this deliberate fragility in the face of earthquakes—she describes ‘how easily /they fall away’. In fact, paper houses are less easy to destroy, because of their flexibility in the face of an earthquake.

The poem then moves rapidly on to consider ‘Maps too’. Maps are ways of finding out not only about places, but about the people who made them. The image of seems to suggest that the transparency of paper makes the maps appear three-dimensional—the marks on the paper like the real erosion ‘that rivers make’—and that this is literally illuminating, as ‘the sun shines through / their borderlines’.  Light here is seen as something that is truth-bringing. Dharker seems here to be thinking about how the human uses of paper can inform us about human nature. Even details such as grocery bills, she suggests, can tell us a lot about each other. Receipts, representing what is bought and sold, are transformed into ‘paper kites’, something which suggests liberation and childish play, but which is also another echo of eastern culture (one thinks of the fighting kites in The Kite Runner).

The image is developed with the thought of how the multiple pieces of paper used by a person could be transformed: ‘an architect could use all this’. The image is almost of a papier mache house, with strips of paper layered over and over each other to create a firm fabric for building. The way in which light can come through paper, it is suggested, would give an additional beauty to the building, ‘to trace a grand design’. An architect building in this way, it is suggested, would never want to use traditional materials again. This final image essentially suggests that the buildings are made up of experiences ‘layer over layer’.

The building described in the final stanzas becomes therefore a metaphorical building of experience, a ‘grand design’ which is touchable, strokeable, ‘never made to last’, allowing light to shine through it. At the conclusion of the poem it becomes clear that this building is built out of ‘living tissue’—that the paper ‘tissue’ that represents human experience, history and knowledge is here combined with human touch and affection for the ‘tissue’ of skin. The final line stands alone ‘turned into your skin’, again directly, almost abruptly addressing the readers and drawing them into the poem. In effect the metaphor enlarges to suggest a person created out of the experience and knowledge of the past. It is possible that Dharker is thinking here about the traditional image of God as an architect, designing the world and its people (as in Blake's famous image). The idea of a greater power creating humanity through layers of experience and emotion seems to echo these ideas.

AQA Power and Conflict: 'War Photographer'

'War Photographer' is from Carol Ann Duffy's striking first collection of poetry Standing Female Nude (Anvil, 1985). It is a piece which, like may of Duffy's poems, seeks to look below the surface of a situation, and examine the feelings hidden beneath the faces that people present to the world. It also, like many poems in the collection (including the title piece), is about the interaction of people with art, and what art represents. You may see a text of the poem here.

Although Duffy is famous for her use of the dramatic monologue, this poem, which could so easily have been written as a monologue, instead is written in the third person, which gives it some distance--arguably, the same distance of which the poem speaks between creator and observer. However, it uses an omniscient tone which apparently allows us to see into the photographer's thoughts and feelings.

Street execution of a Viet Cong Prisoner, Saigon, 1968

The poem explores the idea of how a war photographer, a bystander to atrocity, yet manages to take pictures without being devastated by what he does. The origins of the poem apparently lie in Duffy's friendship with the photographers Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths, and in their discussion with her about their work (there's an interesting interview with McCullin here which gives a sense of what he went through). In an interview, Carol Ann Duffy said how interested she was in the idea of a war photographer as opposed to the photos he might take: ‘in the dilemma of someone who has that as a job... to go to these places and come back with the images.'

War photography has long posed a moral dilemma. There are some shocking photographs of war atrocities which seem to demand of the reader 'how could someone record this and not intervene?' Of course, most of the time the answer is evident. One would not intervene in an execution in a hostile country, for instance, for fear of being executed oneself. Yet to film that execution still seems to make the photographer complicit with what is done. In the online comments for the interview with McCullin above, one commentator says about the 81-year old McCullin, apparently without irony 'I tend to think the honourable way out for a war photographer is to die on the front line. Otherwise it is ghastly exploitation'. 

The poem describes the photographer carrying out his work, developing photographs, and remembering what happened in each case. The narrative suggests that the photographer feels that what he does is in some senses a sacred duty—something that must be done, although he finds it personally painful. His role in recording the images of war is a task that he feels ‘someone must’ do in order to publicise the atrocities being committed.

The poem is written in sestets of roughly equal length—mostly iambic, and many lines in pentameter, though not consistently. The regular rhyme-scheme, ABBCDD, avoids resolution with the A and C rhymes left unmatched, —something that seems to echo the war photographer’s own sense of turmoil, even as the sestets suggest how he seeks to impose calm on this feeling. The unpartnered end-words , however, often find internal echoes if not end-rhyme. For instance the assonantal rhyme between ‘alone’ and ‘intone’ or ‘tears’ and ‘beers’ further help to bind the poem together. The use of enjambement helps to create a conversational tone, which de-emphasises the rhymes as well, making the couplet rhymes subtly emphatic.

In the first stanza, we are presented with the picture of the photographer in his darkroom, ‘finally alone’, with the emphasis on ‘finally’ suggesting that for him this is a place of refuge from other people. The space is implicitly calm, as rolls of film become metonymic ‘spools of suffering’, the alliteration emphasising the contrast between the controlled ‘order’ which arranges them, and the agony which engendered them. The language of the poem suggests a semantic field of religion, with the photographer’s ritual of developing film (this is of course set in a pre-digital age) compared to the ritual of a priest saying Mass. 

In a dark-room, in order to protect light-sensitive film as it is developed, the only light which can be used is red light. Duffy was raised as a Catholic, and in a Catholic Church, a red light by the altar indicates the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle—the body of Christ. This is significant, as it suggests that the work that the photographer does, in revealing suffering to people in order to create compassion (‘passion’ itself means suffering of course) is analogous to the role of the priest in revealing Christ to people. The extended simile which compares him to a priest suggests the seriousness of his work, and echoes of the Bible emphasise this impression. The quotation from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah ‘All flesh is grass’ is often used as a commonplace to indicate that all are subject to death. Here, it suggests the universality of the experiences that the photographer has had in the different locations named, its passive acceptance at odds with the horror of the conflicts. 

The three sites which Duffy names here were all locations of significant conflict when she wrote the poem--and all, interestingly, examples of civil conflict, where the people concerned were in dispute with others of their own country. In Belfast, the ongoing violent civil war between republicans and loyalists was known as The Troubles. You can find out more about it in detail here on the BBC website.  In Beirut, the Siege of Beirut had started in 1982, when Israeli troops invaded Lebanon to attack the PLO. Between 15,000-20,000 people are estimated to have been killed, mainly civilians. Phnom Penh probably refers to the Cambodian Genocide which took place between 1975-9. In all these locations, the war photographer would have seen horrific injustice and cruelty.

The short, almost clipped sentences (‘he has a job to do’, ‘something is happening’) suggest the photographer has only a brittle control over his emotions. In the second stanza the process of developing film by putting the paper of the photographs into trays of developing and fixing solution is described. The use of the word 'solutions' here is ironic--the developing of the photographs is in one sense a 'solution' for the imperative 'he has a job to do'. The solutions are also the dissolved chemicals in liquids he uses to achieve this. His hands tremble as he develops the photographs--perhaps in anticipation of what he will see.  

The contrast between 'Rural England' and the locations at which he has taken the photographs is powerful, with the image of exploding fields maiming children perhaps recalling one of the most famous war photographs of all time--that taken by Nick Ut of the nine-year old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running from a napalm attack which had burned off her clothes. This kind of agony is contrasted with the 'ordinary pain' which, it is implied, a sunny day can cheer. The distance between the experience of England and the war zones which he covers is vast, and is in some ways a recreation of one of the most famous war poems of all time, Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’.

In Brooke's sonnet, which opens 'If I should die, think only this of me', he describes how he may, as a soldier, one day lie dead in a 'foreign field' which he will somehow make 'forever' English through his presence. He imagines an ‘English heaven’ whose imperialist expectations are opposed to the ‘foreign dust’ with which he will mingle. A similar opposition here suggests that those in ‘rural England’ drinking beer (rather than Brooke's tea) are equally detached from the realities of war, and do not realise the visceral horror of 'how the blood stained into foreign dust'. However, instead of being reassured that this world of peace exists, the protagonist  of 'War Photographer' seems increasingly disturbed by the disjunction between his work and the 'home' to which he returns. 

The poem takes us through the stages of the photograph developing, with the features of this man appearing slowly in stanza three through the developing solution like ‘a half-formed ghost’. The simile becomes real as the man is also a ghost in the sense that he is dead and yet his death is still haunting the photographer, his features 'twisted' in remembered agony as well as in the process of development. The photographer's need for 'approval' from the man's wife to film him plays on the sense of the use of the word 'approval' for consent--it is the same word as the one used for when pictures are selected by an editor of a newspaper. The use of  'foreign dust' is powerfully ironic in its reference to Brooke, as the photographer seeks to create a universal world of shared feeling, pleading 'without words' (perhaps referencing the language barrier and/or the impossibility of speaking to someone in such pain) for permission to film a dying man. 

Throughout the poem, phrases such as 'he has a job to do', 'to do what someone must' show how the photographer feels his work to be a duty. Nonetheless, his feelings about his employment are complex. He knows that although his photos are significant, that they may not always be treated as significant. The editor will select only some out of hundreds, and so cannot hope to tell the full story of the experience. The photos chosen will be part of the 'supplement' of the newspaper (the sunday colour supplement magazine) but not actually front page news--this choice implies that they are not being taken as seriously as the photographer would like. Ultimately, the photographs may have an effect on the readers of the papers, but only as part of their Sunday morning routines; there is little certainty about how profound or lasting this impact will be as they move on to their ‘pre-lunch beers’. The sight of the photographs may move the paper's readers, but it will  not change their lives, or disturb them.

As the poem proceeds, the photographer seems to come to a sense of heightened clarity about his role—even as the readers see his pictures, he will be heading off to take more—and his ’impassive’ stare from the aircraft towards the war zone seems to both mimic and criticize the detachment of the English public towards his pictures. The poem ends finally with a sense that ‘they do not care’; that nothing, no matter how horrific, is sufficient to disturb the comfort of the quiet ‘rural England’ to which he has returned.