With sentences like All day, day after day, they’re bringing them home, and, they’re bringing them in, piled on the hulls of tanks, in trucks, in convoys, the plague like numbered deaths is emphasised greatly. The reader is slowly let in on more of an image throughout the poem. The first few sentences are barely descriptive, but it goes beyond adjectives only a few rows down. After they have been zipped up in their plastic tombs; they’re tagging them now in Saigon, in the mortuary coolness they’re giving them names, they’re rolling them out of? he deep-freeze lockers – on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut? the noble jets are whining like hounds,? After the bodies have been labeled, the first truly powerful words are used, ‘mortuary coolness’, by describing where they keep the bodies. This makes the thought of death even more chilling. This segment also introduces the first use of a simile. Once they are ready, the jets that will take their bodies home whimper sadly for the fallen soldiers. Alliteration comes into play once they are close to home, home, home – and the coasts swing upward, the old ridiculous curvatures.
This explains how eager everyone is for them to come back home, and how abundant in joy the soldiers used to get to thought of it through the repetition of ‘home’. The next part talks of how the curves of earth are, for this situation, ridiculous. This is because they are gates of sorrow, only passed to be present at reckoning. Personifications is used once, and is somewhat more of a simile. The planes start descending to earth, tilting like skiers, as they approach their landing.
The Essay on Hospital Time Home Day
... His routine was mapped the same way day after day- go to work, come home, drink, eat, and sleep. Talking became alien ... because when my mother and I came home from work the next day, we saw him lying on his bed ... worse. His skin color has gotten pale and his body weight dropped a drastic 43 pounds. He was barely ... me to find out. I came home from junior high on a half-day and no one knew about it. ...
The planes holding the brave soldiers finally land and, the howl of their homecoming rises, describing the aircrafts’ loud, pronouncing arrival. More significant words land in the poem as the planes group together; surrounding them like their last moments. This sentence represents the loud, ear crushing sounds of both the present planes and past gunfire and warfare. The soldiers are off the planes and being sent home, on to small towns where dogs in the frozen sunset raise muzzles in mute salute.
Not only does this vivid language give a living image, but it shows how the families (to even their pets) are sorrowful for their losses. This continues through another use of a metaphor and simile to spread the news to loved ones, on to cities in whose wide web of suburbs telegrams tremble like leaves from a wintering tree. This tells how the messengers that must tell other loved ones hands’ tremble in fear to be the bearer of bad news. Again, it emphasises how large a scale this war was and how Dawe believes it is unseen to the power of its true horror.
The last sentence of the poem, – they’re bringing them home, now, too late, too early, sums up some of Dawe’s opinion. The soldiers that came home did so too late, because they were killed in action, and too early because they were so young. The effects of war for these kinds of reasons is seen too lightly by the rest of the world. For some, that is because of ignorance. However, for the majority, it is because its comprehension is too great and ghastly for the human mind. The recognition of those involved in war can never be enough.
