‘War Photographer’, by Carol Ann Duffy, opens with a photographer coming home from
a trip. Finally alone, he's in his darkroom, setting
out his equipment, and he thinks about the different places that he's been to. In stanza
two, he starts to develop the pictures. He is reminded of the contrast between the war
zones he's been to, taking these photographs, and rural England that he comes home to. In
stanza three, a picture is beginning to develop. He thinks about the death of the man in the
photograph and the cries of the man’s wife. In the final stanza, the photographer realises
that the people in England who look at these war photographs in a Sunday newspaper will
be sad for a moment. Then they’ll forget and carry on with their lives again. The poem
ends with the war photographer flying out to a war zone. In the 1998 Channel 4 programme
Password, Carol Ann Duffy said ‘Those photographs are in the background but I'm more interested
in the photographer… in the dilemma of someone who has that as a job… to go to these places
and come back with the images’. Now this is just a quick recap of the poem
for revision purposes – for more details see my full analysis video, which I’ll link
at the end. Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish-Irish poet,
born in 1955 in Glasgow. She was friends with Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths, two
photographers famous for their war photography. In terms of power and conflict, we can read
‘War Photographer’ as a poem about how we fail to grasp the reality of war. The poem
has a very tight and controlled structure. There are four stanzas, each made up of six
lines. The rhyme scheme follows the same pattern: ABBCDDEFFGHH etc etc. It’s a very tightly
ordered and controlled poem, perhaps reflecting the war photographer’s job, trying to impose
order on the chaos of war. But suffering in war cannot be controlled and neatly ordered,
so the structure seems to contrast the topic of the poem, and contrast is something we
see throughout the poem. We could also say the unchanging structure
shows how the war photographer’s efforts are futile. Nothing changes. He's trying to
make us realise the reality of the horrors of war, but everything just carries on as
normal – represented by stanza after stanza carrying on like the previous ones.
Duffy’s use of caesura is key, too. ‘Rural England’ is placed between two full stops.
Rural England is, therefore, separated completely from the descriptions of the war zones, And
this reflects how the people in the poem are able to separate themselves from the reality
of war. This is also represented through the half
rhyme in the line ‘with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers’. there's the half
rhyme, the mid-line rhyme of ‘tears’ and ‘beers’. And that actually quickens the
pace in this final stanza. It represents the speed at which people forget the atrocities
of war they are looking at in the newspapers .
There is also a cyclical structure in the poem. It begins with the war photographer
coming back from a trip. In his dark room, he is finally alone. And it ends with him
going back out on another trip in the aeroplane. This cyclical structure highlights the futility
of the war photographer’s job – in that he's trying to make an impact and make people
realise the true horrors of war, but people are taking it as a quick two-second glimpse
of sadness and, then, carrying on with their very ordered and structured lives and forgetting
about it – and how that's such a futile endeavour.
‘All flesh is grass’ is an intertextual reference to the Bible. It's found in the
Book of Isaiah chapter 40 verse 6. And what is being talked about in Isaiah is the sort
of transitory, fleeting nature of human life. But it's also the name of a Christina Rossetti
poem which is about the same topic. That life comes and goes in an instant.
And you could say that the poem, in its reference to Isaiah or/and the Christina Rossetti poem,
is just highlighting the fragility of life. And that the fragility of life, through the
Rossetti poem and, then, through the biblical scripture, is something people have been writing
about for thousands of years. Yet, still, somehow, we ignore it like we ignore the war
pictures in this poem. We might think about it for a second, but we don't fully acknowledge
the fragility of life as represented through the intertextual references that are so historic
here. It's almost like this has been going on forever, but we still hide away from it.
There are Some interesting plosives in line six. Now, a plosive is where we have a consonant
that is produced by stopping the airflow using the lips, teeth, or palate. So [p] and [b]
sounds are two of the plosives, and we’ve got them all here – ‘Belfast. Beirut.
Phnom Penh.’ And these plosives have this kind of quick-fire
pace, a bit like gunfire. So the plosives break the piece of what went before and give
us this quick blast of ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, sort of gunfire. But, also, there's a structural
device here, a caesura. Again, because the full stops break up the lines. And what we
would like to do here is, probably, just read these place names and move on. But the full-stop
forces us to stop and think about Belfast, about Beirut, about Phnom Penh. And the whole
poem, of course, is criticising how we don't stop and think about the reality of war, the
reality of conflict and suffering, so the structure here makes us stop and think about
just that – to actually stop and think about these places.
If you found this video useful please do give it a thumbs up and I will make some more!