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Analysis of "War Photographer" by Carol Ann Duffy
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Analysis of "War Photographer" by Carol Ann Duffy
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iGCSE/ GCSE ENGLISH LITERATUREPOWER AND CONFLICT ANTHOLOGY
War Photographer
In his dark room he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.
He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
beneath his hands, which did not tremble then
though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.
Something is happening. A stranger’s features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must
and how the blood stained into foreign dust.
A hundred agonies in black and white
from which his editor will pick out five or six
for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick
with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns his living and they do not care.
Carol Ann Duffy
, "War Photographer" centres on the tension between the all-encompassing
sorrow and horror that the photographer experiences as he looks through
the photographs and the casual, temporary sympathy with which he knows
his viewers will engage with such images. The poem depicts the
experiences of a photographer who returns home to England to develop the
multitude of photographs that he has taken in an unspecified war zone. The
photographer contends with the trauma of what he has seen and his
bitterness that the people who view his images are unable to empathise fully
with the victims of catastrophic violence abroad. The poem references a
number of major historical air strikes and clearly draws imagery from Nick Ut's
famous Vietnam War photograph of children fleeing the devastation of a
napalm bomb.
Form and structure
The poem is laid out in four regular six-line stanzas, with each stanza ending in a
rhyming couplet. This structure is interesting since its very rigid order contrasts
with the chaotic, disturbing images described in the poem.
This organisation mirrors the actions of the photographer, who lays out his films
in "ordered rows", as though in doing so he can in some way help to restore order
to this chaotic world. The poem moves through a series of observations in the
first three stanzas to a conclusion of sorts in the fourth.
The style is almost clinical and matter of fact, perhaps to imitate the clinical
approach required by people in this line of work to allow them to execute their
work under conditions of extreme pressure. Unlike the readers of the newspaper
that he works for, this sense of distance is a necessary requirement for the
photographer.
In a poem that is so focused on images of human suffering, Duffy concentrates on
the sense of sight throughout the poem and the final image is almost like a
photograph itself, depicting the journalist surveying the landscape and its
inhabitants below impassively (calmly, dispassionately, forbearingly) as he travels
to his next assignment. This image is reminiscent of the line “He has a job to do.”
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