Explicatory Essay

Explicatory Essay "War is Kind" ( Pg. 480 )

In the poem "War is Kind," The author tell a story from many different points of view. Each point of view discusses how that person feels about the "kindness" of war. Throughout the poem there are three lines that are immensely important to the meaning that the poem represents. One of these three lines is seen within every stanza of the poem.

Within the first stanza of the poem the lines "Do not weep/ War is kind," appears at the end. These add to the contradiction that war is kind, yet throughout the first stanza it can be seen. from the actions of the woman, that war is obviously not kind. The same lines, "Do not weep/ War is kind," also appear in stanza three, and also in stanza five. The lines appear, just as in stanza one, at the end of the stanza. From the stanzas in which this contradiction occurs, it can be seen that war is not kind, but cruel. A woman crying over her dead lover, a daughter weeping for a father that will never return, and a mother mourning for the son that she lost to war. These images depict the cruelty, not kindness, of war and are important to the overall meaning of the poem.

In the second stanza the line, "A field where a thousand corpses lie," is written at the end. When placed at the end of the stanza, it shows that young soldiers in war are led to believe that it is heroic to fight and die for ones country. In the fourth stanza, the line appears again. When the line appears this time, it is no longer referring to the young soldiers, but to the older and more seasoned soldiers who train the young soldiers and lead them n their missions. These older soldiers know the cruelties of war, but they try to remove the fear of death from the younger ones by insuring them that if they were to die, that they would die as heroes, trying to make them see only the virtue that comes from putting