A detailed analysis of the poem ‘War Photographer’ by Carol Ann Duffy, tailored towards GCSE / IGCSE (Edexcel and CIE/Cambridge) students but also useful for those studying at a higher level.
Includes:
VOCABULARY
STORY/SUMMARY
SPEAKER/VOICE
LANGUAGE
STRUCTURE/FORM
ATTITUDES
CONTEXT
...
“In his dark room he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.”
(Full poem unable to be reproduced due to copyright)
VOCABULARY
Dark room - a dark enclosed space that is used to develop photographs (non digital
photographs are sensitive to light, so they have to be processed in the dark, with
only a low red light to see by).
Intone a Mass - to deliver a speech or sermon for a Mass in a flat, non - variable tone
of voice. A Mass is a Roman Catholic ceremony of worship where catholics receive
the Eucharist - they eat a wafer and drink wine, which symbolically represent the
body and blood of Jesus Christ respectively (this process is called
‘transubstantiation’). In the poem, the type of Mass being referred to in the first
stanza would be a funeral service.
Agonies - feelings of extreme pain.
Impassively - showing or feeling no emotions.
Spool - a circular device that holds film or photography tape.
Sunday’s supplement - an extra small publication that’s sent along with the regular
newspaper on Sundays for people to read, usually for leisure and entertainment.
STORY/SUMMARY
Stanza 1: The speaker tells us of a photographer who is alone in his dark room,
developing photographs that he has recently taken. He sets the photographs (which
are of people suffering in war) out in rows to look at them, and this process is
compared to a priest preparing his Mass. The final line lists cities that were sites of war
- the Irish and British conflict in Belfast, the civil war in Lebanon (Beirut) and the civil
war in Cambodia (Phnom Penh), before commenting that ‘all flesh is grass’, a phrase
which reminds us that human life is transient and that after death we all return to the
earth.
, Stanza 2: We’re told that the photographer has a job to complete - when he was
taking the photos his hands didn’t tremble, but they do now. He’s back home in Rural
England, the English countryside is calm and peaceful, any worries he may have can
here be fixed with good weather - unlike the countries where he took the photographs,
where the fields exploded as children ran through them, away from conflict.
Stanza 3: This stanza shifts focus to a particular photograph that’s developing before
his eyes - he remembers the man and his wife, how they were suffering and he took a
photograph of them because ‘someone must’, despite the fact that he didn’t ask them
directly if it was ok to document their pain. It says that ‘he sought approval’ but
‘without words’, so perhaps they just accepted that he was taking photos, or they were
in too much pain to truly notice or communicate with him. The final line may refer to
the blood of this couple, or the blood of others at the scene where they were
photographed - it provides us with a lasting shocking image of blood-stained earth in
the aftermath of war and conflict.
Stanza 4: We have another focal shift in the final stanza, which zooms out to ‘a
hundred agonies’ that the photographer documented, as we realise this man and his
wife were just one small example of the suffering endured by many. The
photographer’s editor has to pick only a few of these images to show to the public in a
Sunday newspaper supplement. The reader of this supplement will be briefly upset by
the images, in between taking a bath and going for beer with their friends. We’re left
with a final image of the photographer, who stares emotionlessly out of the aeroplane
window at the land below, knowing it is a country torn by conflict, where he’s being
sent to earn money by taking photographs.
SPEAKER/VOICE
The speaker uses a third person omniscient voice to shift between the photographer
and other figures in the poem - the husband and wife in the photograph, the editor of
the supplement, the readers who experience the images through the media. These
figures are all unnamed - to show they represent general people, rather than specific
individuals, which gives a wider picture of society as a whole and how it reacts to
distant war. There is a cynical tone expressed in the poem, where Duffy comments
on the ironic and insensitive way in which we consume media - only seeing a small
proportion of what really goes on in any war or conflict, and only experiencing even
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