Complete 4 page APA formatted essay: A Synthesis of the Themes in Selected Poems about War.Download file to see previous pages... The superiority of honour over love has been asserted effectively. Dut

Complete 4 page APA formatted essay: A Synthesis of the Themes in Selected Poems about War.

The superiority of honour over love has been asserted effectively. Duty overpowers desire. This assertion, however, makes one think how honorable it really is to bid farewell to true relations based on mutual love and respect, and proceed to shedding blood of fellow humans. What then, is honorable - to experience the love of another on an individual level, or to contribute to hatred and enmity on a mass scale? Searching for the answer to all these questions is important for us as humans,

War is not always restricted to the battle field, and affects civilian lives in more than one ways. War poems are, therefore, crucial in understanding how the collective psyche of people under war becomes deformed and unnatural. Keith Douglas, in his poem “How to Kill” reflects this deformity of man’s mind effectively. Ruthless in its title, the poem is one where the persona makes the reader witness a murder in the battlefield. Behind the “dial of glass”, the killer becomes insensitive to the death of a human, and exclaims

“Being damned, I am amused

to see the centre of love diffused

and the waves of love travel into vacancy.

How easy it is to make a ghost.”

The language is striking in its effect. “Love” is “diffused” from its core like a chemical reaction, while the “waves of love travel into vacancy”. The scientific jargon used to describe emotions and love is disturbingly uncanny, where the unnatural deformity caused by war is crudely highlighted. The use of the word “amused” to describe the soldier’s reaction on killing his opponent is another example of how distorted human emotions become in war.