The crowd, openly smug but secretly sneaking home, wilfully refuse to acknowledge the pain and senselessness, because this would be to acknowledge their own part in creating the war.
The poem as a whole both juxtaposes and compares general society with the suffering of the soldiers. Society as a whole ignores the suffering of war, but in this very act lies its own suffering. The senseless suicide is ignored only because society is not able to handle the full extent of the horror that led to it. The young solder was filled with "empty joy." In many ways, the joy society feels when their "heroes" are hailed upon their homecoming is similarly empty. It is a joy that understands the suffering that underlies it. When the suffering overtakes the joy, a young man commits suicide. It is to protect their empty joys that those who remain behind will not acknowledge the pain of war.
The structure of the poem as it relates tot its content is also significant. The poem is regularly structured, with the rhyme scheme occurring in pairs. There are four quatrains, all sharing the same rhyme scheme. One is almost presented with a visual representation of a march. This could have two possible interpretations. Firstly, and most obviously, it signifies the military precision of the soldiers who march home. On amore subtle level, it indicates the carefully constructed, but empty, lives and joys of the citizens. It is a structure initially experienced by the young soldier with his empty joys.
The trenches however rob the soldier of his construct and consequently his life. In this
way, the poem's structure serves to both compare and contrast with the content of the poem. It compares with the emptiness of the soldier's initial happiness, as well as the careful structure of society and the fabric that holds it together. On the other hand, it contrasts with the chaos caused by war. Whereas marching soldiers indicate structure and order, the pain that causes the same marching soldiers to take their own lives is utterly chaotic. It is only by ignoring this chaos, as represented by the suicide,...
The soldier is simply unable to live with this corruption. Instead, the narrator continues as his voice by proxy, indicting the society that caused the war and created the atrocity the killed the solder. Likewise, Graves is forever changed by his experience, losing the respect he used to hold for the values and norms of the society that caused the war and failed to understand the effect of the
Romeo and Juliet is complex, because of several reasons. First, the two protagonists are young and, as a consequence, their relationship has all the immaturity that comes with the age, as well as the need to dramatize everything, including the need to take drastic measures when things don't go the right way (which helps to explain why the two characters die in the end). Second, they are members of two
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