November 13, 2017
6th hour The theme of this poem, would be a soldier who thinks of war as beautiful rather than it being a dreadful and sad environment. I would think that the author wrote it in a descriptive style, because he describes what has happened by using tone and imagery. In the first part of the poem, Ehrhart wrote,
“What if I didn’t shoot the old lady running away from our patrol, or the old man in the back of the head, or the boy in the marketplace?” (Ehrhart).
He uses imagery to paint a picture in your mind that a soldier from war feels guilt and regret for killing non combatant (a civilian, person who is not a part of the war) people. He visions what would have been different in his life if he had not killed those people. Now, in the second part of the poem, the soldier is then explaining how the non combatant people lived life the same way as any other soldier, in the war, did.
“Or what if the boy—but he didn’t have a grenade, and the woman in Hue didn’t lie in the rain in a mortar pit with seven Marines just for food” (Ehrhart).
Both, him and the others would have to do the same things in …show more content…
The “Place of Angels,” and “rotting sandbags, incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud.” He wants to imagine it as the “Place of Angels,” because it was once the “rotting sandbags, incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud,” that turns into a “Beautiful Wreckage.” In my opinion, I think the author uses the fourth stanza to have a correspondence with the title of this poem. In the fifth part of the poem, he uses to connect with the fourth part. He then has the soldier explain what it would be like if the “Place of Angels,” were the people he had killed and his friends that died in the war. He is imagining that these people had become angels, and that they put an end to Gaffney getting more hurt than what he already was during the course of