War Photographer — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
War Photographer
The poems
What you need to know
A war photographer developing his pictures at home in England, haunted by what he saw, and the newspaper readers who glance at them and move on.
How the war photography of the 1970s and 1980s shapes the poem, and how its religious imagery, contrasts and ordered stanzas work.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'In his dark room he is finally alone', 'spools of suffering set out in ordered rows', 'as though this were a church and he / a priest preparing to intone a Mass', 'Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.', 'which did not tremble then / though seem to now', 'to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet / of running children in a nightmare heat', 'a half-formed ghost', 'A hundred agonies in black and white', 'The reader’s eyeballs prick / with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers', 'he earns his living and they do not care'.
Form: four six-line stanzas, each ending in a rhyming couplet, as ordered as his rows of film; religious imagery of a priest and a Mass; the list of war zones; and the contrast between the war zones and Rural England.
Context: from Duffy's first collection, Standing Female Nude (1985); Duffy, born in Glasgow in 1955, was the first woman to be Poet Laureate; war photographers of the time, such as Don McCullin, who covered Vietnam and Northern Ireland for the Sunday Times Magazine, and Philip Jones Griffiths in Vietnam and Cambodia.
Compares well with: Decomposition on photographs of suffering and the people who look at them; Remains on images that will not go away; Disabled on the public that forgets.
