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Stephen Crane's War Is Kind

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The poem ‘War Is Kind’ is a very ironic poem by Stephen Crane telling wives and mothers of men going to war that all is ok and your husbands and sons are going to live. The poem ‘War Is Kind’ is based off of Cranes experiences in war in Greece and Cuba. “War Is Kind” is the exact opposite of what it says which makes it ironic because war is not kind but is ruthless and kills thousands.

To even begin where it starts to begin when it starts to become itronic. Just the first sentence says “Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind” which starts it off sad and ironic at the same time. The first line is kind of sad while also true because everyone dies but it is sad because they died in war and not next to the wife or mother. “Do not weep, maiden” refer to both the wife and mother because either their wife/mother or both would weep for the loss of their child or husband. As Shmoop says “war is the most rudest, awful thing ever” which confirms the ironic theme of the poem. Although it may inspire patriotism it is still a nasty dirty poem of death and sadness. …show more content…

Again as stated from Shmoop “war is the most rudest, awful thing ever.” Even if war was kind there would still be death for some son, husbands, and fathers. Also, all of these people end up with their men dead in a trench somewhere during a bloody battle. In each battle there were deaths which caused more and more people to lose their children, husbands, and fathers because war is not kind and war is unforgiving. This poem is all about how all war destroys the ties of family with

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In the poem Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind by Stephen Crane, Stephen talks about the aspects of war and the effects it has on people outside of the war. Another poem called the sonnet-ballad by Gwendolyn Brooks, talks about a woman who has just lost her lover do to the war and is asking her mother where happiness is. In both texts, the authors focus on the negative and how cruel war really is. Although the authors focus the the horrific parts of war, Brooks sees beauty in war and how tempting it is. However, Crane only focuses the dreadful and grim parts of war.

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This description paints the scenes of the poem as they happen, the powerful connotations of the words battling against each other, and to the grievance of the reader, the negative feelings prevail. This battle illuminates the brutality and fear experienced by soldiers, in WWII, during their final moments on Earth - their fear, sadness, and horrified disgust all hidden between the lines of these two sentences. Foreshadowed by the soldier's machine like tone, the speaker alludes to the fact that he will fight for his life, and

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He also, shows them how soldiers could become desensitized fighting ‘machines’ throughout the Civil War. Stephen Crane uses irony in “War is Kind” and “A Mystery of Heroism” to prove that he is opposed to the Civil War by showing the reader how soldiers became desensitized to the war, while he also, informs the reader about the hardships the Civil War caused. The Civil War just like any other war there ever was has caused many soldiers to become desensitized. Making the soldiers believe that they were just “...born to drill and die.”

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In her award-winning first book, Margot Canaday insists that historians of homosexuality should bring the state back into their work by paying more attention to the role of federal policies in shaping homosexual identities—and that political historians should recognize the degree to which sexual identity, no less than race or gender, has shaped governmental policies and the boundaries of citizenship. Her searching examination of citizenship and sexuality points to important new directions for work in these fields of study. The “state”—in the form of vice squads, municipal courts, and liquor boards—has hardly been absent from community histories of urban gay life, but few studies have shared Canaday's singular focus on the national administrative state and none has engaged as extensively with recent theories of citizenship. From the

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The poem shows how utterly absurd war is and how being so patriotic in this time frame is equivalent to a death sentence. As Haley mentioned, this poem was written in 1926 following the First World War. The speaker references a few times to war: “thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry” (7) “… What could be more beaut-/iful than these heroic happy dead/who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter/they did not stop to think they died instead” (9-12). As the title, may suggest, (and I’ll put this with punctuation for emphasis) Next to, of course, god… America… I.

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Soldiers go into war to fight for something they believe in. They do this knowing the risks that come with war. That’s why soldiers are so grateful when they come home from war unscathed. Many soldiers tend to capture this gratitude with words. The author of the poem delivers a solemn message about war.

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It gives off the a tone to the reader that there is war or that there once was war. Levine’s word usage is what gives the poem its unfortunate tone right from the start. Rather than choosing softer language, he starts his poem with words a phrases like “acids of rage” (Levine 3) and

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First, this particular poem shows an abundant amount of sarcasm throughout the entire piece. The tone is considered sarcastic because throughout the poem Crane says that war is kind, but if you look at the stanzas, Crane doesn’t use facts to support his assertions .The title of the poem is an ironic choice of words that immediately shows that sarcasm is sprinkled out everywhere in the poem, including the title. The speaker indirectly tells people to not weep after describing in detail the death of their loved ones. In the poem, Crane writes,“your lover threw wild hands toward the sky”.

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In Richard Lovelace’s To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars, although the poem is written to say farewell to the mistress because the speaker is going to sacrifice himself and is going to war, it is playful and romantic. This poem mainly focuses on how romantic it is for someone to go fight in a war. In Alfred Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, the one is set to be serious and respectful. The poem is about how soldiers who went into battle should be honored for their doing, and that war places soldiers under extreme stress and pressure.

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/ War is kind,” to showcase the fact that war is ugly and painful not only for those who perish in it (the men whose deaths are described), but also for those who grieve because of it (the women whose lives are forever changed by war). Additionally, verbal irony can be found in stanzas two and four, in which Crane chooses words that, taken literally, speak of the glory of war in order to highlight the shame of it. For instance, Crane writes, “These men were born to drill and die / The unexplained glory flies above them / Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom – / A field where a thousand corpses lie” (Crane 8-11).

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In "Do Not Weep, Maiden, for War is Kind," the first example of a paradox is "War is kind" (Crane 5). War and kindness are exact opposites, as war results in the loss of millions of lives and the destruction of even more families, and kindness is associated with positivity and light. Therefore, linking war with any positive connotation is absurd. By characterizing war as kind despite its mass death, Crane's paradox demonstrates how it can be covered with glory, as the two concepts of kindness and glory are closely linked. The phrase "Great, and his kingdom—/ A field where a thousand corpses lie" (Crane 10-11) is used again in the first poem.

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Even though Crane was born years after the Civil War had ended, Crane conducted extensive interviews and viewed an immense amount of photographs, battle plans, and biographical accounts to input realistic attributes into his literary work, “An Episode of War.” To begin with, Crane describes an event in which a soldier divides up coffee, when he states “His lips pursed as he drew with his sword various crevices in the heap until brown squares of coffee, astoundingly equal in size, appeared on the blanket” to depict what soldiers did when they were not fighting. Although most historical accounts center on battles, soldiers were not conducting battle at all times, for the most part they had incredible amounts of free time. In addition, soldiers

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The poem aims to glorify soldiers and certain aspects of war, it goes on to prove that in reality there really isn 't good vs bad on the battlefield, it 's just a man who "sees his children smile at him, he hears the bugle call, And only death can stop him now—he 's fighting for them all.", and this is our hidden meaning.

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The terms of the Treaty of Versailles were announced, and I am greatly indignant. The final treaty hardy resembles Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which the majority of us Germans assumed would be the main influence in the peace negotiations. Our country had no say in the creation of the treaty, which ended up being extremely unreasonable towards us. The Treaty of Versailles is unfair towards us.

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Many poems about the civil war convey universal themes of the time. Stephen Crane’s poem “War is Kind” is no different. The poem,“War is kind” written by Stephen Crane(1871-1900) has three themes common to civil war literature: Warfare, Home, and Patriotism. This poem’s overall theme is about how war destroys families conversely to the title of “War is Kind” or the many times which Crane says “War is Kind”.

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