Máximo Rivi

After having read “Children in Wartime” and “The End of Summer” and having analyzed the poems thoroughly, I have reached the conclusion that when being asked which poem expresses the horrors of war better, I consider “Children in Wartime” a superior example of the dreadfulness of warfare and what people, particularly children, have had to suffer in consequence of man’s ambitions.

In both poems, the use of imagery is recurrent. In “Children in Wartime”, we can see the use of imagery right in the first lines, where the author writes “Sirens ripped open the warm silk of sleep”. After reading this, the image of “warm silk” comes to mind as something pleasant or soothing; however, the previous words, “sirens ripped open”, give a whole new perspective on the poem and changes everything inside of the reader’s mind, giving him a bittersweet taste right from the start. Later in the poem, we find some very powerful imagery used again when the author writes “thunder left such huge craters of silence”. Since thunder cannot leave “craters of silence”, we understand the author is using imagery again. These words convey a powerful feeling of loneliness, of silenced desperation, where the victims of “thunder”, the victims of flak and bombardment, are either dead or praying to survive the attack, which has taken the words out of their mouths and has created these “craters of silence” among the sufferers.

 In “the End of Summer”, imagery is not as plentiful as in “Children in Wartime”, but we can still appreciate some by the end of the poem such as in line 13, where the author writes “The sun on rooftops gleaming underlines the need to kill”. “The End of Summer” starts in a comfortable, if not happy, scenario; Children are returning from their first days of school after satiating holidays, the days are cool but it is still summertime, and the atmosphere created by the author is that of true ease and warmth. Unbeknownst to the children, in a department store there is a terrorist about to detonate a bomb, thus the lines “the sun on rooftops gleaming underlines the need to kill”. Since it was dusk, the sun was in that position where it adopts a deep reddish tone and it becomes larger and somewhat more intense. When the author talks about the sun “underlining the need to kill”, it is refering to the sun’s intensity and its red concentrated color which was simultaneously gleaming on the Department Store’s roof where the bomb was bieng planted.  

To conclude, I chose “Children in Wartime” as a better example of the losses and the consequences war brings to those affected by it. Although both poems achieve the goal of transmitting a sour feeling of death, “Children in Wartime”, through metaphors and similies, strikes the reader (or at least it stroke me) with a more profound effect.