Andrew's Wiki
Repression War

Content

• A poem about being at home, in England
• Dramatizes and describes experience of soldiers trying to keep out “ugly thoughts,” “thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you”
• Odd time: seems to be night after a day of fighting, but other verses seem to be from a viewpoint when you’re back at home (around all your books)
  • At home, he says, you’re haunted by “horrible shapes in shrouds” that weren’t killed by the war, but instead “slow, natural deaths” and ugly people
    • We’re seeing that war is infecting your opinion of everything else: of the causes of war, of the people who made or let it happen

Form

• Like “The General,” uses ellipses and paragraph breaks
• Vernacular style and diction
• “And you’re as right as rain … / Why won’t it rain? ...”
  • Shows association, going from one thought to another laterally
  • Thematizes metaphors and idiomatic language, showing how critique happens, how reflection on language happens when you are attuned to the moral problems of life b/c of your war experience
  • Lack of rain like Waste Land (he even WISHES for the rain to come too)
• First few verses set up the idea of needing to repress and ends w/him trying to train his mind on something else; middle one represents the fight to forget, that he losesw; final one (separated by paragraph break) is completely broken up
  • Broken up by ellipses, exclamation marks, interjections, dashes
  • Trying to represent going mad: someone in England hearing the guns outside (the war experience coming back)
• It is NOT one of those poems that use beautiful form, so the form doesn’t make any SENSE of the experience, whereas some of his earlier 1917 (this one 1918) poems were too lapidary to truly express something horrible