Analysis Of The Landmine By Melissa Range

Although the Landmine and the Rope in Melissa Range’s poems are both made to participate in horrifying violence against the innocent, the Landmine reveals its boastful indifference by twisting imagery of life and hope into a grotesque threat to haunt the world of peace long into the future, while the Rope reveals its humble sympathy by longing for a future that redeems violence by affirming life and beauty. The stories “The Landmine” and “The Rope” both have horrible way of killing people that don’t deserve to die. In the beginning of “The Landmine”, it shows very harsh and dark violence against people who are totally innocent. The Landmine is “in hiding” giving you no time to protect yourself from getting killed by it. It tells us “it

The Landmine tells the readers that “[we]’re [his] fuse”(9) and its “sole/ reason”(10-11) for its journey into the soil, warning the readers that it’s coming for them, and only them. It gives us the scared thought of not being able to escape the wrath of this Landmine sitting in the ground, causing us to realize the reality of this tragic weapon humankind has made. The makers of landmines put them in the ground not realizing that if they didn’t blow up, they are bound to blow up eventually when someone or something comes in contact with it. Even if the person is totally innocent, he can still be killed just from walking over where the landmine is. Like “The Landmine”, you can see horrible types of violence in “The Rope”. In the poem, the Rope describes all its victims saying it can hang “almost any neck in the woods”(3), no matter their race or their actions that led to them being hung. It then disgustingly describes that it doesn’t only hang men, it also hangs women and children, “whose necks are more

In the end of “The Landmine”, it takes a quick turn for the worst. It uses agricultural words like sow, seed, harvest, and bloom, which promote life and hope, shielding us from the horrible things that it does. It also reminds us how it will never go away and is unavoidable unless it is triggered by something. It will be there “after all [our] wars have ceased”(14). The Landmine ends the poem by saying that even though it is buried, it “won’t rest in peace”(15), which brings to mind a ghost haunting us, and it also gives us the thought that any person, no matter how innocent, can step on it and can be killed, blown to pieces in an instant. On the more positive side of the poems’ changes is “The Rope”. After it talks about all the cruel things it has done, it starts to talk about what it could be doing “in another life”(20). It rejects its violent past-life by saying “Twine wasn’t made for this”(22). Then, after the rejection of its past, it lists off around six things it would rather be doing than killing. Some of them include doing things that make people happy like “[tying] [it] to an old tire, and let children swing”(28). The others include things that are related to agriculture like “baling hay”(22) or