Naming of parts

The theme of "Naming of Parts" by English poet Henry Reed is “War”. In this poem, the
poet explores war’s effects on young men who desire in their hearts to enjoy life for the
beauty it offers. However, these men are inducted into warfare by their respective
governments and these governments’ geopolitical agendas.

The focus of this poem is contrasting the mechanical, boring, ‘naming of parts’ of a
weapon of warfare, with the aesthetically pleasing elements of life. These pleasing
aspects of life include the natural beauty of the physical environment around them, the
flora and fauna of the earth. This is expressed in the line “Japonica/Glistens like coral in
all of the neighboring gardens”.

The contrast here, as the theme of War is explored, is that the soldiers are under duty to
learn and understand the parts of a rifle (and how they work). They will become
proficient at killing, while the earth and its beauty and bounty are witnesses against
them of their destructive behaviour.

In essence, the world around us, in its splendour, silently accuses humankind of its
penchant for chaos and destruction. The world around us does not take sides. It
laments for all opposing parties who engage in war and its destructive results.

This abomination of the ruination of the creation is also referred to in a line in the Book
of Revelation in the New Testament, which says, “… and that you should give reward to
your servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear your name, small and
great; and should destroy them which destroy the earth. (Portion of Revelation 11:18;
American King James Version).

The theme of War is also discussed in that Henry Reed considers that men of war, - in
fact all who engage in war, whether voluntarily or involuntarily - are not of eloquent
gestures when they perform warlike acts. Humankind in general is not eloquent at all
when it inflicts pain on one another. Nonetheless, simple branches of trees “Hold in the
gardens their silent, eloquent gestures”. People can destroy the eloquence of the
environment around them.

Other pleasing aspects of life are also conveyed in the discourse in the poem,
especially about the beauty of lovemaking. As noted above, this isn’t obviously pointed
out. Upon studious reading, this is recognized; it is an indictment against human beings
for considering War not Love, within the Family of Man. It evokes a 1960s nostalgic
“Make Love not War” feeling, however hackneyed and antiquated that seems today.
The poem includes a reference to bees – the birds and the bees if you like.

The poem speaks of horrific War against the backdrop of spring, love, almond-
blossoms, flowers, and such. War is man-made. It is mechanical in its cold precision. It
often relegates feelings to the basement of our psyche, so that on the upper floors we
concentrate on the objectives of War.
There are two speakers in the poem, a drill sergeant and a recruit. It is written in first and third
person. The drill sergeant has more of a stern attitude which gives part of the poem a serious tone
and the recruit is more lighthearted soldier that is bored during the training, which gives those
parts more of a happy and carefree tone. Some details that give information about the persona is
the constant change of subject from spring to the parts of a gun. Some lines have more of a stern
tone than the ones about the flowers and the branches.
In the poem, it is the beginning of spring. The blossoms are fragile and motionless, and the bees
are fumbling with the flowers. There is a drill sergeant trying to teach the soldier about his gun.
Halfway through, the soldier's mind begins to wander as he notices all the signs of spring.
There is a constant comparison of Spring and of the soldiers gun. The different parts make the
soldier realize a different part of nature during that Spring day.
Images that evoke your senses are the bees as they are assaulting and fumbling the flowers, the
fragile and motionless flowers, and the branches in the gardens, their silent, eloquent gestures.
These help you easily envision the setting the soldier is in.
The pattern in this poem lays in each stanza. The last two or three lines talk about Spring time,
and the beginning lines in each stanza talk about the parts of the gun.
The central symbol is the parts of the gun. The gun has many parts that make it a gun, just like
Spring. The parts of Spring in the poem, show the setting and help readers envision it.
There is no rhythm in the poem shows the easing of Spring. The poem is has five stresses in the
top lines and only three in the last line.
The rhythm of this poem is the most effective, and is the best part about this poem. It shows
Spring easing its way in. This wasn't my favorite poem that I have read. It was hard to get into
and really understand. I didn't care for it.

The Poem
"Naming of Parts" is a thirty-line lyric poem divided into five stanzas. The poem depicts a group
of infantry recruits receiving a familiarization lecture on their rifles. The title reflects the
practical, if prosaic, necessity of knowing the proper term for each of the rifle's parts. Readers
hear two distinctive voices in the poem—that of the insensitive, boorish drill instructor giving
the lecture and that of a sensitive, young recruit whose mind is wandering during this mind-
numbing discourse on rifle terminology. The key to understanding the poem is realizing that
roughly the first three-and-a-half lines of each stanza present what the young recruit is literally
hearing and enduring while the remaining lines suggest what he is thinking and noticing as his
instructor lectures about rifle parts.
The first stanza opens with an overview of the week's training schedule. As the first lines make
clear, this day's class will be devoted to learning the names of the rifle's parts. The recruit's mind,
however, is elsewhere. He notices the Japonica shrubs blooming in neighboring gardens, a detail
that establishes the season as spring. In the second stanza, the instructor is calling the group's
attention to the rifle's "swivels" that are fastened to the weapon's wooden frame or "stock." The
missing "piling swivel," a part the military deems inessential, inspires the recruit's sudden notice
of the branches described in lines 4 and 5. In marked contrast to his present situation, he finds the
natural scene to be complete and whole in and of itself. The third stanza concern's the rifle's
"safety catch," which functions to prevent unintentional firing. The sudden mention of blossoms
at the end of the fourth line once again indicates that the recruit is dividing his attention between
the lecture and the springtime scene. He is struck by how the blooms of flowers simply exist.
Despite their fragility, they need not learn safety procedures nor must they comply with any
arbitrary strictures.

With the next stanza, the instructor has moved on to the principal moving part of the rifle: the
bolt. In an effort to demonstrate how the rifle operates, the instructor is mimicking the firing
process, using the bolt handle to move the spring-operated bolt back and forth. The military
jargon for this procedure is "easing the spring." Witnessing the local bees engaged in the process
of pollination, however, inspires the young soldier to reinterpret this phrase in a sexually
suggestive sense. As the initial repetition of the phrase "easing the Spring" indicates, the fifth
and final stanza functions as a sort of reprise of both the lecture and the recruit's reactions to it.
He has obviously seized upon two phrases from the lecture, the "cocking-piece" and the "point of
balance." The rifle's "cocking-piece" functions as a fitting symbol of sexual tension, once more
suggesting the "release" he and his fellow soldiers are being denied. The

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rifle's "point of balance" leads the young soldier to reflect on how their present situation has
thrown their lives out of balance.

Forms and Devices

Reed divides the poem into five six-lined stanzas, each of which follows the alternating pattern
already explained. Within the stanzas, the principal poetic devices are imagery and wordplay
calculated to evoke connotations at odds with the denotations of the instructor's words and
phrases. The effect is to illustrate what Reed sees as the inherent contrast between the world of
nature and the world of war. In the first stanza, for instance, the image of Japonica plants
glistening "like coral in all of the neighboring gardens" stands in stark opposition to the rifle
imagery in the first three-and-a-half lines. The second stanza turns on the image of the
missing "piling swivel"; contrary to this image, the tree branches mentioned in the fourth and
fifth lines bespeak a peaceful, harmonious, and integral relation with nature. The phrase "silent,
eloquent gestures" sets up a thematic opposition to the third stanza in which the soldiers are
being admonished to release the safety catches of their rifles with their thumbs. This clumsy
gesture further contrasts with the serenity of the "fragile and motionless" blossoms, and the
corresponding reiteration of the phrase "using their finger" evokes a sexual connotation the
instructor hardly intends.

The fourth stanza juxtaposes the image of "easing the [rifle's] spring" with that of bees
"assaulting and fumbling the flowers." The imagery and the connotation are again sexual, with
the flowers likened to passive victims and bees to sexual predators. The principal play on words
is the repetition of the phrase "easing the Spring"—now with an uppercase s. The young recruit
is thinking of the sexual release symbolized by the bees pollinating flowers. The last stanza
serves as a summation: The first few lines are once more devoted to the instructor's phrases, but
this time they are not taken out of context. As a consequence of what has come before, the
phrases and images come home to the reader in the full force of their associated sexual
implications. Juxtaposing these once again with the natural images repeated in the fourth and
fifth lines heightens the reader's sense of what these young soldiers do and do not have.

Themes and Meanings

"Naming of Parts" addresses an issue philosophers and military historians have long termed "the
problem of war." In its simplest terms, this problem is whether war is an aberration or a perennial
part of the human condition. Reed's poem posits at least a partial answer. The fact that spring, the
season of renewal and rebirth, still unfolds quite heedless of this group's commitment to the
mechanistic processes of war and death carries the main weight of the theme. Reed obviously
views militarism and war as distinctly unnatural. Reed's choice of red-flowered Japonica in the
first stanza, for instance, is significant. As its name implies, Japonica, or "Japanese quince," is
native to Japan—one of the Axis powers against which England and America were allied in
World War II. (Reed, an Englishman, served in World War II, the ostensible

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period during which the poem is set.) The effect is to suggest that nature transcends both national
borders and human notions of loyalty and enmity.

In the third stanza, the criticism becomes personal and specific. In marked contrast to the
instructor's affected anxiety about operating the "safety-catch" correctly, the young soldier is
struck by the serenity of the spring blooms all around him. Reed's inspiration may well have
been the biblical Sermon on the Mount in which Christ urges his followers to heed the example
of the "lilies of the field" that neither toil nor spin (Matthew 6:28). Trapped in the unnatural
world of war, this young soldier feels no such confidence about his basic needs being met. By
applying the instructor's admonition against using one's finger to floral blossoms, the soldier
evokes the sexual connotation of the phrase and betrays his present anxiety. In biological terms,
flowers are essentially feminine receptacles and therefore have long been recognized as symbols
of female receptiveness. This young man, the reader should realize, is confined to a sexually
segregated training camp in the springtime. Sex is clearly on his mind.

The soldier's sexual frustration becomes particularly evident in the fifth and sixth stanzas. The
rapid back-and-forth movement of the instructor's rifle bolt calls to mind the corresponding
motion of the sexual act, an image this soldier connects to the bees in the process of "assaulting
and fumbling the flowers." The connotations and imagery are implicitly sexual, expressing the
soldier's frustrated yearning for sexual release. The introduction of two new elements, the phrase
"point of balance" and the alluring "almond blossom" image, is perhaps meant as an ironic
expression of the carpe diemtradition that counsels complete surrender to the life-affirming lures
of beauty and love. Reed's point seems to be that the enforced segregation of military life
precludes striking a wholesome balance between self-indulgence and disciplined abstinence.

In terms of tone, "Naming of Parts" stands in a long line of poetic responses to war ranging from
the satiric to the elegiac. It is certainly not a reverent acknowledgment of noble sacrifice in the
manner of John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields," nor is it a cavalier endorsement of the traditional
martial virtues of courage and honor such as Richard Lovelace's "To Lucasta, Going to the
Wars." It is also not an unsentimental depiction of death in the manner of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce
est Decorum Est" or Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Reed's "Naming of
Parts" reflects an earlier modernist mood of "irony and pity," to borrow Hemingway's phrase,
and not the bitterness and despair characteristic of the later postmodern movement in literature.
A tone of pessimistic resignation rather than a true antiwar sentiment informs the poem. The real
problem with war, Reed seems to be suggesting, is that people have long deplored modern mass
warfare as dehumanizing and unnatural, as a perverse human superimposition upon the world of
nature, yet they find themselves as impotent in the face of this insanity as they would be
confronting a force of nature.