CHAPTER II

CONTAIN

IDENTITY AND WAR

 The Meaning Identity and War

Definition of Identity

The distinguishing character or personality of an individual : INDIVIDUALITY, the relation established

by psychological identification, the condition of being the same with something described or
asserted establish the identity of stolen goods

Definition of War

A state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations, a period of
such armed conflict

 Government by Carl Sanburg (Identity Poetry)

The topic/subject of this poem is about the outside world and how the “government” has
everything to do with it. This poem is about how everywhere you walk and the actions that takes
place outside is a government action. and how being a government is just as secretively as a human
with inside germs. The theme of the poem is that it’s not hard to find things out that are supposed
to be a secret to the world. The type of poem is dramatic because, it explains in different ways in
how you could see the “government”. he explains it in brutal, calm, excited, particular ways that
make it a dramatic poem.

The calaboose. it was the government in action.” i picked this line because it gives you exactly
what the poem is talking about. There aren’t any confusing lines or passages. No rhyme scheme. No
alliteration. Yes there’s repetition because, they say government in every line.No personification, no
allusions, and there is not a simile.

 The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson (War Poetry)

Alfred Lord Tennyson's 'The Charge of the Light Brigade,' is one of the most famous
poems in the English language. Written after Tennyson read an account of a battle during the
Crimean War, the poem celebrates the patriotism of the many brave English soldiers who died in
the 1854 conflict.

Tennyson's poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade, is based on events from the Battle of
Balaclava that occurred near the Black Sea in 1854. This battle of the Crimean War, in which
England, France and the Ottoman Empire fought against Russia, immediately captured
Tennyson's interest when he read a newspaper article detailing British casualties at Balaclava.
The many dead and wounded English soldiers were the result of a tragic misunderstanding about
the location of Russian arms. Mistakenly informed that these arms were in a valley, the British
troops descended and became easy targets of the Russians. As a result, almost half of the Light
Brigade died.

o The Crimean War

 The Crimean War was fought from October 1853 to February 1856. The Russian
Empire was defeated by an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, Britain and Sardinia. It is
estimated that around 25,000 British, 100,000 French and up to a million Russians died -
almost all of disease and neglect.

o The Battle of Balaclava

The most significant moment in the Crimean War came during the Battle of
Balaclava. An order given to the British army's cavalry division - known as the Light Brigade -
was misunderstood and over 600 cavalrymen charged down a narrow valley straight into the
fire of Russian cannons. Over 150 British soldiers were killed, and more than 120 wounded.

o William Howard Russell reported for The Times:

“They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and
splendour of war. We could hardly believe the evidence of our senses. Surely that handful of
men were not going to charge an army in position … At the distance of 1200 yards the whole
line of the enemy belched forth, from thirty iron mouths, a flood of smoke and flame
through which hissed the deadly balls. Their flight was marked by instant gaps in our ranks,
the dead men and horses, by steeds flying wounded or rider less across the plain.”

Stanza Analysis:

I. The light calvary was marching to the Valley of Death because the foes were no match
for them. It was like committing suicide. They were 600 of them riding horses figthing in
a battle. Their leader ordered them to move forward and consficate the guns to prevent
the guns from being carried away by the enemies.
II. The soldiers were still moving foward. No one was discouraged by the fact that
somebody had made a foolish mistake by giving them a wrong order. They were not in
the position to answer any questions nor to ask why. They kept on moving because it
was their responsibility and they recieved order from their superior. Even if they were
fated to die, all the six hundreds of them were still moving forward.
III. The soldiers bravely fought the battle. They were attacked from their right, their left but
they still moved forward. True enough, they were also attacked from the front. But they
marched fearlessly to the Valley of Death and fought until their last breaths.
IV. The soldiers were riding through this storm of bullets, on horses, carrying swords-
“sabres,” to be exact. Sabres is a kind of curved sword a cavalrymen would have carried.
Focusing on these old-fashioned sabres is another way to point out the desperate
heroism of the Light Brigade, and also a way to connect them to English warriors of the
past. The main action so far, the charge, has gone as far as it can. Now the soldiers have
to turn back where they came from. Some have died. The phrase “Not the six hundred”
is the first hint of the terrible casualties the Light Brigade has suffered. The poem has
been a little grim, but now it starts to become really mournful, like it was meant for a
funeral.
V. The cannon that were in front of them are now behind them, which means that the
Light Brigade has turned around and leaving the enemy behind them. The return trip is
just as deadly and terrifying, it’s just turned around. Line 44 – While horse and hero fell,
emphasizes the loss of life. This stanza ends with the words “six hundred” just like all
the others did. In this case, though, the tone is much darker, and the final image we get
is the remnants of the Light Brigade moving back across the field.
 VI. “When can their glory fade?” –comes in like the sound of a trumpet. It is the Light
Brigade’s desperate, “wild” charge that the speaker wants us to remember. This poem
is spreading the word, telling us that we should “wonder” at this incredible display of
bravery. The poem ends with a couple of commands: Honour the charge they made!;
Honour the Light Brigade; Noble six hundred! The speaker orders us, to respect and
remember these noble war.

Structure Poem
o Six numbered stanza with variety length.
o Tone : Bravery, Heroic
o Anaphora (Repeated Word)
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them
Cannon behind them
o Rhyming couplets
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
o Rhyming triplets
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
o Dactylic meter (has two syllable, each stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed
syllable)
• “HALF – a – league”
• “FOR – ward, the LIGHT - Bri - gade!”

 The Soldier by Rupert Brooke (Identity and War Poetry)

The Soldier is a sonnet in which Brooke glorifies England during the First World War.
He speaks in the guise of an English soldier as he is leaving home to go to war. The poem
represents the patriotic ideals that characterized pre-war England. It portrays death for
one’s country as a noble end and England as the noblest country for which to die.
In the first stanza (the octave of the sonnet) stanza, he talks about how his grave will
be England herself, and what it should remind the listeners of England when they see the
grave. In the second stanza, the sestet, he talks about this death (sacrifice for England) as
redemption; he will become “a pulse in the eternal mind”. He concludes that only life will be
the appropriate thing to give to his great motherland in return for all the beautiful and the
great things she has given to him, and made him what he is. The soldier-speaker of the poem
seeks to find redemption through sacrifice in the name of the country.
The speaker begins by addressing the reader, and speaking to them in the
imperative: “think only this of me.” This sense of immediacy establishes the speaker’s
romantic attitude towards death in duty. He suggests that the reader should not mourn.
Whichever “corner of a foreign field” becomes his grave; it will also become “forever
England”. He will have left a monument of England in a forever England”. He will have left a
monument in England in a foreign land, figuratively transforming a foreign soil to England.
The suggestion that English “dust” must be “richer” represents a real attitude that the
people of the Victorian age actually had.
The speaker implies that England is mother to him. His love for England and his
willingness to sacrifice is equivalent to a son’s love for his mother; but more than an
ordinary son, he can give his life to her. The imagery in the poem is typically Georgina. The
 Georgian poets were known for their frequent mediations in the English countryside.
England’s “flowers”, “her ways to roam”, and “English air” all represent the attitude and
pride of the youth of the pre-industrial England; many readers would excuse the jingoistic
them of this poem if they remember that this soldier’s bravery and sense of sacrifice is far
better than the modern soldier and warfare in which there is nothing grand about killing
people with automated machine guns! The soldier also has a sense of beauty of his country
that is in fact a part of his identity. In the final line of the first stanza, nature takes on a
religious significance for the speaker. He is “washed by the rivers”, suggesting the
purification of baptism, and “blest by the sun of home.” In the second stanza, the sestet, the
physical is left behind in favor of the spiritual. If the first stanza is about the soldier’s thought
of this world and England, the second is about his thoughts of heaven and England (in fact,
and English heaven).
The images and praises of England run through both the stanzas. In the first stanza
Brooke describes the soldier’s grave in a foreign land as a part of England; in the second,
that actual English images abound. The sights, sounds, dreams, laughter, friends, and
gentleness that England offered him during his life till this time are more than enough for
him to thank England and satisfactorily go and die for her. The poet elaborates on what
England has granted in the second stanza; ‘sights and sounds’ and all of his “dreams.” A
“happy” England filled his life with “laughter” and “friends”, and England characterized by
“peace” and “gentleness”. It is what makes English dust “richer” and what in the end
guarantees “hearts at peace, under an English Heaven.”
This is a sonnet based on the two major types of the sonnet: Petrarchan or Italian
and Shakespearean or English. Structurally, the poem follows the Petrarchan mode; but in its
rhyme scheme, it is in the Shakespearean mode. In terms of the structure of ideas, the
octave presents reflection; the sestet evaluates the reflection. The first eight lines (octave) is
a reflection on the physical: the idea of the soldier’s “dust” buries in a “foreign field.” They
urge the readers not to mourn this death, though they implicitly also create a sense of loss.
The last six lines (sestet), however, promise redemption: “a pulse in the eternal mind….
under an English heaven”. The rhyme scheme is that of the Shakespearean sonnet: the
octave and the sestet consist of three quatrains, rhyming abab cdcd efef and a final rhymed
couplet gg. As in Shakespearean sonnets, the dominant meter is iambic

 The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell (War Poetry)

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner' by Randall Jarrell is the post-modern elegy in which the
speaker himself is a mourner of his death. Beside it, the poem is the criticism of devastating
war. In order to expose the horror of war the poet employs imagery of abortion by drawing an
analogy between the Ball Turret of the fighter plane and the womb of the mother.

The ball turret itself was a feature of the bomber aircraft, a B-17 or B-24, made of plexiglass and
set into the belly of the plane. From this sphere a gunner, upside down, could track the enemy,
revolving as he let fly with his machine guns.

The speaker says that from his mother’s womb, he fell into a state. He passed from one womb
to another womb. It is the journey from the darkness to darkness. He could never experience
 the freedom of human being. He feels that he was never born. Inside the mother’s belly fur was
wet, and inside Ball Turret he was wet because of fear and sweat. He is continuously attacking
enemies and he is six miles above the earth. The life had come up with dreams and
expectations. But he could never see these dreams. Therefore, he never got a life.

The title of the poem is significant as it states the death of a man, a mere soldier, whose death
is so common to the state. But to general people it strikes a stark, grim tone. The expression
"my mother's sleep" is the first clue of the womb metaphor in the poem. The speaker fell from
the womb of the mother to the womb of the state and he feels so feeble to control the
situation. Another womb metaphor in the poem is "I hunched it its belly” which parallels the
position of the fetus in the womb to the position of the ball turret gunner in the bomber craft.
The stark contrast is that the womb of the mother is warm and nurturing, but the womb of the
state is cold and indifferent suggested by the phrase "my wet fur froze".

Even though this poem is quite short but we think that the poem is powerful enough to give us
a vivid scene of war. After reading this poem, we realized that the title actually refers to how a
death in the war mean nothing to anyone, once the soldier death they just washed the body out
and replacing to another one.

 MCMXIV(1914) by Phillip Larkins

MCMXIV is one of Philip Larkin’s best-loved poems. Completed in May 1960, the poem was
published in Larkin’s 1964 volume The Whitsun Weddings.

MCMXIV focuses on the year 1914, the year of the outbreak of the First World War, in August
1914. This setting for the poem is hinted at in Larkin’s reference to the ‘August Bank Holiday
lark’.

Stanza Analysis:

I. The first stanza focuses on an old photograph depicting a group of men who have just
signed up to fight in the war, the long uneven lines denoting the old style of taking
photographs with people arranged into long rows. The time setting of 1914 is glimpsed
in the broad brush-strokes Larkin paints: the fact that the men are all wearing hats, and
the fact that they sport moustaches, after the fashion of the day. Even their faces look
‘archaic’ means old-fashioned.
II. The second stanza talk about the style of the shop fronts in those days, the old coins,
the children all having names like Victoria and Elizabeth and George and Edward, having
been named after kings and queens.
III. The third stanza then leaves the world of the town behind and pans out yet further, to
consider the countryside, and the big country estates with their clear staff hierarchies
(the servants being dressed differently depending on their rank or position in the
household): this is the pre-war period that the first series of Downton Abbey would
reflect, in more recent times. The reference to Domesday lines takes us back to the
Norman Conquest of 1066, and the Domesday Book, that vast audit of English towns,
cities, and villages undertaken under William the Conqueror. What Larkin is suggesting
here is nearly 1,000 years of unaltered English history and social structures, all of which
is about to be undermined and destroyed by the First World War.
IV. The final stanza forms a sort of conclusion to the poem, with Larkin pondering the
change wrought by the war. The innocent way of life embodied by the pre-war world,
and outlined earlier in MCMXIV has gone forever. Larkin ends with a couple of examples
 which are ambiguously phrased. The many men leaving the gardens tidy suggests not
only the idea that before the war men seemed to be in touch with the land in a more
intimate way, but also the notion of these men leaving their gardens behind for the
very different terrain of the Western Front, many of them never to return. The mention
of the marriages lasting a little while longer similarly houses two meanings: marriages
lasted longer in those days because divorce was less common and people were more
traditional in their approach to marriage, but all of these marriages were, of course,
literally to last only a little while longer – until the husbands were killed in the conflict.

Questions :

The Charge Of The Light Brigade

1. There’s number in this poem, why not you called it part 1, part 2, etc..? (Risya Emalia)
2. Is there any other identity in this poem? (Rizaldi Mu’min)
3. Can be identity and war at the same time? (Rizaldi Mu’min)

Government

1. I found it no identity in this poem, can you show it? (Nur Shafa)

The Soldier

1. You said that that in this poem, he presented in naive ways. Where is the naive ways you
talking about? (Purwa Bintang)

Answer :

Government

1. Because it’s an identity in government. You can see there is a bad thing and good thing in
the government. Mostly is a bad things.

The soldier

1. It’s his style. The naive things about this poem is not something related to idiot. It’s just
something that he said that really innocent and sentimental. That’s why people called naive