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Power and conflict comparison (poems) for GCSE
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Compare how poets present the effects of memory on people in Poppiesand in one other poem from Power and Conflict.- Remains.
Both poems explore ideas about the negative effects of memory. In Poppies, though
the mother has happy memories, they become melancholy ones when she realises
her son is no longer her ‘little boy’ and she cannot protect him from the negative
things in life such as going to war and being in physical danger. However, Remains
the Soldier has no happy memories of the moment he took another person’s life
instead of choosing to protect him and over time the memory of that moment has
negatively affected his whole life.
In Jame weir’s poppies, the narrator is reminded of how she and her son always
played together and the memory of her son echoes a sad undertone as she says she
“(plays) at being Eskimos like we did when you were little”. This domestic imagery
shows that the memory makes her feel sad because she is no longer able to do that
with him anymore as he is going to war and she may or may not see him again and
have that same experience with him just like when he was “little”.
but she is just trying to be “brave” so that she doesn’t reveal how she truly feels
about her son leaving for war. The adjective “little” on the other hand, could show
that the narrator still misses her “little” son and she can’t overcome the fact that he
may be gone for life and the realisation of this alone makes the memory of her son
more pathetic. Jame Weir may have done this to show that a mother’s mind will
never remain the same and the memory of her son without clear knowledge of either
dead or alive, creates a sad moment. This therefore makes the reader empathise
with the narrator as the mother is getting overwhelmed with the thoughts that her son
may be dead in a “grave”.The effects of this memory therefore creates a sad
undertone. However, In Remains, the “shadow” of his memory, being his enemy
doesn’t even seem to leave and rather than him remembering the past like in
poppies, his past feels like it is right “ here and now” and this creates a sense of
frustration and anger in the narrator as he wants the memory to leave and never
come back unlike poppies when she really wants her son to come back to her. The
use of the abstract noun “shadow” emphasises the dark side of his life and it keeps
coming back to haunt him, the effects of this memory makes the narrator quite angry
as he is presented using curse languages such as “bloody”. The use of this adjective
is repeated to re-emphasise the effects of the memory playing back as it now has an
effect on his psychological well being and how he speaks.
Furthermore, In poppies, Weir presents the narrator with a sense of longing and
physical connection with her son as she “wanted to graze(her)nose against the tip of
(his)nose”. The use of the bodily language such as “nose” to “nose” shows that the
narrator really wanted her body to have a physical connection with her son and the
fact that this never happened later on in the poem may have created a sad feeling in
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