Literary Analysis Of The Minefield By Diane Thiel

Sometimes life is best explained in metaphors. Sometimes the hurt, pain, and anger found in life are more easily grasped when one looks at them in terms of other objects. This is how the poem,“The Minefield,” written by Diane Thiel, looks at pain and anger. Written in short and choppy lines with no clear rhythm or rhyming pattern, this poem tells the story of a man who witnessed his friend blown to pieces in a minefield. Because of this, the man who witnessed this terrifying tragedy has grown into an angry and broken soul. The author explains this man 's broken emotions in terms of minefields: the literal minefield made his emotions into a figurative minefield, where “anything might explode at any time” (Thiel). Diane Thiel creates something …show more content…
This, according to Scott Helton’s explication on “The Minefield”, “helps to convey the forcefulness of [the words’] meaning. Throughout the poem, the reader may notice a certain choppiness in the rhythm, with short statements without any decorating transitional words nor flowery speech. For example, the final line of the first stanza which describes the boy’s friend’s death simple states “his body was scattered across the field.” This statement lacks common euphemisms surrounding death and simply hits the reader with a brutal visual image of what happened. Furthermore, in the next line of the poem, the author …show more content…
For example, in the first stanza, the author uses a simile to describe the older boy: “His friend ran a few lengths ahead, like a wild rabbit across the grass.” Not only does this simile add an interesting element to the story for the reader to think about, but it also visually stimulates the reader. Perhaps the most powerful figure of speech, though, is the metaphor at the end of the for which the poem is named. The narrator describes the boy who witnessed his friend’s death, now a father, as carrying the minefields throughout the years. Obviously he’s not holding on to the literal minefields, but rather the metaphorical ones: the emotional baggage, the fear, and the rage from this experience. Sadly, the narrator says that he took out these emotions on his children: “He gave them to us- in the volume of his anger, in the bruises we covered up with sleeves.” At the closing of the poem, the narrator describes the father similarly to minefields, “that anything might explode at any time, and we would have to run alone.” The imagery used here is painfully visual. By using wording that not only gives the reader a brutal image of bruises but also of the rage the father holds, the author invites the reader in to cautiously experience the situation right along with the children of this