Hello everybody and welcome to this video where I'm going to analyze the poem ‘Kamikaze’
by Beatrice Garland.
I've been very blessed to be in communication with the poet herself, so a few details I'm
going to share have come directly from Beatrice Garland herself.
About Beatrice Garland Let's start by looking at the poet then.
Beatrice
Garland was born in 1938 in Oxford.
After completing a degree in English Literature, Garland worked in the NHS – still does work
in the NHS – as a clinician and teacher.
In 2001 she won the National Poetry Prize, and 'Kamikaze' comes from the collection of
Fireworks, a 2013 collection of poetry that focuses on life and death in the natural world.
Now Garland said that she has a particular interest in what can motivate young men and,
these days, young women too, to give up their own lives in the service of a higher cause.
And, in this way, we can link the poem to 'Tissue' in that it explores the causes of
fundamentalism or terrorism.
'Kamikaze' isn't particularly tricky to understand, but there is possibly one stumbling block
we need to cover which is the four generations in the poem.
The poem contains a mother talking
to her children and she's talking to her children.
So, here’s the mother talking to her children.
She's talking to her children about her father (the kamikaze pilot) and his father.
So there's
four generations in this poem, and that's probably the hardest thing to get your head
around so just picture it visually as I have it on the screen there.
Now let's have a look at the poem itself.
I'll give you a sort of simple translation
of each stanza.
Her father embarked at sunrise with a flask of water, a samurai sword in the cockpit,
a shaven head full of powerful incantations and enough fuel for one-way journey into history
So her father left at sunrise.
He took some water and a samurai sword in the cockpit of
his plane.
He had a shaven head full of strong ideas and only enough fuel in the plane to
go to his destination – not to return back again – because he was going on a one-way
journey in to history.
but half way there, she thought, recounting it later to her children, he must have looked
far down at the little fishing boats strung out like bunting on a green-blue translucent
sea
So halfway there, the daughter imagines when later telling her own children the story,
the pilot must have looked down at the fishing boats and the beauty of nature.
And beneath them, arcing in swathes like a huge flag waved first one way than the other
in a figure of eight, the dark shoals of fishes flashing silver as their bellies swivelled
towards the sun
So, beneath the fishing boats, the fish swimming and moving in beautiful patterns.
Now, incidentally,
many draw parallels between the fish and kamikaze planes attacking in this stanza but I don't
think it helps us in this analysis.
But it might be something you fancy looking at in
your own time.
and remembered how he and his brothers waiting on the shore built cairns of pearl-grey pebbles
to see whose withstood longest the turbulent inrush of breakers bringing their father's
boat safe
So it reminded him, looking down at the shore, of his own childhood - the pilot's own childhood
playing on the shore with his brothers whilst waiting for their father to come back from
fishing.
- yes, grandfather's boat - safe to the shore, salt-sodden, awash with cloud-marked mackerel,
black crabs, feathery prawns, the loose silver of whitebait and once a tuna, the dark prince,
muscular, dangerous.
So, yes, it was my grandfather's boat back to the shore filled with fish and crabs and
prawns and, once, a tuna.
And though he came back my mother never spoke again in his presence, nor did she meet his
eyes and the neighbours too, they treated him as though he no longer existed, only we
children still chattered and laughed
So although he came back from his kamikaze mission, my mum never spoke again when he
was around or looked at him.
Everyone treated him as shameful, and we children carried on
as normal until we learned...
till gradually we too learn to be silent, to live as though he had never returned, that
this was no longer the father we loved.
And sometimes, she said, he must have wondered
which had been the better way to die.
So we learned to be silent as to treat him as if he wasn't there.
This was not the man
we had once known and loved.
He must have wondered whether kamikaze death would have
been better than this emotional death.
So a little bit about the context of the poem about the kamikazes.
During World War 2, the word ‘kamikaze’ was used to describe Japanese fighter pilots
who were sent on suicide missions.
What they did was, they flew their planes and crashed
them into enemy warships to kill everybody on board but, also, obviously died themselves.
And it was seen as a sacrifice which brought great honor in Japan.
So how do we view this poem in terms of a power-and-conflict poem?
Well, this is where
Beatrice Garland has been so helpful.
And one of the things that she said is that the
conflict is personal as well as national.
Now let me say that again.
So, she said the conflict is personal as well as national.
And that's how I'm going to tackle this poem - as a conflict poem - looking at how the
national conflict of war causes inner conflict.
The pull between two different impulses because
the pilot is torn between his mission and his desire to return home.
And Garland explained just recently - today, in fact - to me that his choice was not futile.
This is a quotation - “His choice was not futile.
I think it was honorable, and I think
he knew that, in spite of how painful it was, Japanese society did not agree.”
End quotation.
So what we're looking at in terms of this is a poem of conflict, is the conflict between
the cultural expectation on the man and the inner conscience.
The cultural expectation, the military expectation, the National expectation was that he would
go and kill himself as a kamikaze pilot and that would bring great honour to him.
The inner conscience which we'll explore in this poem was that he wanted to return home;
he didn't want to do that.
And the conflict is the pull between the two - the cultural
expectation on the one hand and the inner conscience on the other.
Now, with this in mind, there's some valuable comparison to be made between ‘Kamikaze’
and ‘Exposure’.
In both poems an active military man questions what he's doing, thinking back to life at
home and the comforts of family.
But in ‘Exposure’ we have ‘kind fires’ and ‘sun smiles’
motivating Owen to fight.
The opposite happens in Kamikaze.
In Garland's poem, thoughts of
the beauty of nature and memories of home caused him to turn around and return.
So let's just look at the structure to begin with then.
If we're looking at this poem as the pull between national conflict versus personal
conviction, we need to look for opposites in the poem.
And one can be found in the structure.
On the one hand, the poem has a very tight structure.
Every one of the seven stanzas
is made up of six lines, and this tight structure can be seen to reflect the tight control of
the military and the culture and its expectations of exactly what this person should do.
Very
tightly controlled.
But to contrast this tight control, the poem is written in both free verse and contains
numerous examples of enjambment.
So free verse, as you know by now, is poetry that does not rhyme or contain a regular rhythm.
Enjambment is where sentences flow onto separate lines and even stanzas.
And we see both in
Kamikaze.
For example, between the final two stanzas, the enjambment covers not just two lines but
two whole stanzas as you can see on screen.
Similar to ‘My Last Duchess,’ a poem which
talks about power and control yet loses that control and order through the sprawling use
of enjambment.
So what's the point?
The free verse and enjambment lack the tight control, contradict the tight
control that we see in the length of the stanzas.
And this freedom of expression reflects the
freedom the pilot wants to have.
The conflict between his personal thoughts and sense of
national duty are reflected in the conflict and the contrast between structural points.
What about language?
One of the most obvious points the poem uses is a lot of natural imagery.
A lot of the poems use this, don't they?
And we see perhaps the nicest example in ‘a
green-blue translucent sea’.
A beautiful image of nature.
Similarly, we have ‘the dark shoals of fishes flashing silver as their bellies swivel towards
the sun.’
Another very positive image made all the more so because of the poet's use
of sibilance - the repetition of the ‘ss’ and the ‘sh’ and the ‘th’ sounds which
create hissing sounds: ‘the dark shoals of fishes flashing silver as their bellies
swivel towards the sun.’
So the sibilance here creates a sense of energy, smooth movements reflecting the natural wonder
of the fish.
But the question is why?
What does Beatrice Garland spend a lot of time
describing the beauty of nature for?
And one of the communications the poet had with me
was, she said this, “So, the beauty of nature shows us,” and this is a quote, “why he
should not want to deprive himself and hundreds of other young men on the ship he was supposed
to have annihilated of that intense pleasure.”
End quotation.
So, in other words, through looking at and reflecting on the beauty of nature, the pilot
thinks, “This is amazing.
Experiencing nature in all its beauty is something that is so
great a part of life, and I shouldn't deprive hundreds of other people of that through completing
this mission.”
A number of poems in the power and conflict cluster focus on the power of nature.
We see
this in ‘Ozymandias’, ‘Tissue’, the boat stealing episode from ‘The Prelude’.
In all of these poems there's a sense that mankind thinks of itself as being powerful
but nature proves itself to have the true power.
We see glimpses of this in Kamikaze.
Particularly in the description of the tuna - ‘a tuna,
the dark prince, muscular, dangerous.’
Now, considering this is a poem about a kamikaze pilot, isn't it interesting that the most
powerful character in the poem is the tuna fish?
The metaphor ‘dark prince’ coupled
with the adjectives ‘muscular, dangerous’ create a threatening, intense, powerful image.
And the poem’s first full stop appears after this line which signals its importance.
We
need to stop and think about it.
The punctuation tells us to do this.
So what's it all about?
Well, despite the best efforts of the pilot, it's the tuna fish
that is truly powerful in this poem.
The natural imagery as in Ozymandias or the mountain in
the boat stealing episode is truly powerful.
Perhaps the poet is suggesting that true power
belongs to nature.
Man's efforts are futile.
Maybe it's this realization that causes the
pilot to turn around and return home.
There's much more to the world than he perceives.
And taking this even further, we can say that the message of this moment is the realization
of how minute and unimportant human life is when contrasted with the vast array of nature.
There's a lot of ambiguity in the poem as well, and the power of nature versus the power
of man can be seen in one single image in the opening of the poem which is the sunrise.
“Her father embarked at sunrise” is a clever image.
Sunrise is an image of nature - powerful nature - but it's also a link to Japan which is known
as the Land of the Rising Sun.
A Rising Sun flag like the one we see here on the screen
is the military flag, and it's used primarily by the military forces of Japan and Japan’s
self-defense forces.
It illustrates a red sun with rays that emanate from the red circle
in the middle which symbolizes the Rising Sun as shared in the Japanese flag.
So, in this one image of sunrise we see the power of nature and the power of man conflicting
each other.
Another structure point to look at can be seen in the poet's use of repetition - “and
remembered how he and his brothers waiting on the shore built cairns of pearl-grey pebbles
to see whose withstood longest the turbulent inrush of breakers bringing their father's
boat safe - yes, grandfather's boat safe -”
Here we see the repetition of the word ‘safe’.
Not only repetition but also the structural
choice to place the word at the end of the line twice.
The repetition hints at the mindset of the pilot.
It's not necessarily he himself wants
to be safe.
He's remembering the times when as a child he waited on the shore for his
father's safe return from the sea in a boat.
And, of course, this symbolizes the pilot
himself who too has ventured out to sea but wishes to return safe to his own children
who he, perhaps, imagines will be waiting for him.
One of the significant images in the poem can be seen in line 21 where the brothers
“built cairns of pearl-grey pebbles”.
Now, a cairn is a pile of stones often used
‘arcing in swathes like a huge flag’,
and here's another simile which shows the pilot’s mindset.
He's thinking of flags
such as the Rising Sun flag that we've already explored.
The pilot seems almost brainwashed, said to see everything through the lens of national
service and the pride associated with it.
And these references reduce as the poem progresses,
signifying the way in which the pilot is becoming more and more convinced that he should turn
back.
Let's have a little think about the type of narrator that is used - different types of
narrator; begins with “her father embarked at sunrise…” “but halfway there, she
thought”.
Now, here the narrator is talking about herself in the third person - her, she - showing the
distance there is relationally between her and her father.
It's like she doesn't want
to associate closely with him, which perhaps reflects the shame he brought onto the family
when he returned home from his kamikaze mission.
However, the poem switches from third-person to first-person direct speech in the penultimate
verse where we have “And though he came back, my mother never spoke to him again.”
Now italics shows where the poem jumps into the first-person direct speech.
“My mother”
shows how the speaker is the pilot’s daughter.
So the shift from third to first person could show the conflict the speaker in the poem
herself feels.
She possibly feels ashamed of how she distanced herself from her father
when he returned.
And now let's consider the ending - “he must have wondered which had been the better
way to die.”
This is a very tragic ending to the poem.
The personal conflict versus
the national conflict, the inner conscience versus the cultural expectation.
He's made
this choice and the pilot, then, finds himself metaphorically dead anyway.
And he ponders
whether a literal death as a kamikaze might have been better than the emotional death
he's experienced since his return.
It's as if he truly is dead.
He's treated like a ghost,
and this is a tragic ending because it shows that the pilot’s choice to return was futile.
In some ways, his decision to return home was a kamikaze mission in itself.
It ended
the pilot’s life as he knew it.
Well, guys, I hope you have enjoyed this video.
Please do subscribe to the channel if you
haven't done so already.
And thanks again to Beatrice Garland who gave a few of those points - the ones I've quoted.
That’s not to suggest that this video represents the poet's ideas on everything, but there
were just a couple of things I asked for clarification from Beatrice Garland on, and she was good
enough to give those points to me.
So I hope you enjoyed the video.
Thank you to the poet.
Please do subscribe to the channel.
I've got a video analysis of every single poem in the cluster.