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Casual Comedy

  • Last seen on Feb 13 10:19 AM 2006. Member since February 14, 2006.

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  • on The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats, on November 8, 2004
    The greatest technique of this poem in my opinion is not that of imagery or prophecy or external references but of the ambiguity of the poem. It creates an uncertiantity of what will happen, and this is what we all fear most is not knowing or understanding what will happen at the end. This poem has a variety of connotations and just like our times it reveals a number of problems and changes facing the world around us, after all Yeats believed a new cycle of history will begin after a series of inter-connecting events.
    In the first stanza the speaker reveals the troubles of the world at present but the second stanza reveals a vision. Note that it is a vision, so this vision is not clear cut and precise.
    For Yeats this may have meant an end to not only Christianity but the conservative views and opions of the world in which he himself believed in. A change in the social justice of the world perhaps.
    Maybe "A terrible beauty" will be born?

  • Slessor captures the naked purposelessness of war and death in war. The sailors' graves are impoverished, as they lay forgotton on the beach. Soldiers are tools in war and the only use they have is to fight in a war that leads to so much destruction. On their graves they do not carry the usual marks of pity and respect afforded to the dead. There is no ritual, no ceremony nor any meaning attached to their deaths.
    In the poem, the arythmic, purposeless and ceaseless motion of the sea mirrors the purposelessness of the sailor's deaths. Just like the war, the sea moves irregualrly and seemingly has no purpose and is never resolved. The waves of the oceans can be seen through the line structure, a motion mimicing the sea.
    Given that this was Slessor's final poem-that stark reality of what he saw in Nth Africa killed whatever motivated him to write in the first place. This peom seemingly argues that there is little if any purpose in life if it can be so easily and uselessly wasted in war.
    Throughout the poem Slessor's view of war can be read as usless, wasteful and the horrible human act of war. 'Beach Burial' reveals the anti-heoric, demythologised, and unsentimental end for so many combatants in war. Until the reader reaches the last 3 lines of the peom, in which the lines become ambigious. The last 3 lines can be interpreted in a numbers of ways, I myself have had trouble with finding one meaning. Could it be these men have found heaven through this devestation? Is it an end of despair? Or no matter what happens in the end humans are the same, lifeless and pruposeless like the motion of the sea?
    In reference to the last 3 lines it seems ironic that enemies can be united-but only in death.