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What Is The Theme Of The Poem Homecoming By Bruce Dawe

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Bruce Dawe's 1968 dramatic anti-war poem 'Homecoming' exposes the dehumanising perspective of conflict, by revealing the devastating amount of insignificant slaughter of soldiers and the lack of identity and humanity during the Vietnam War. 'All day, day after day, they're bringing them home,' Utilising repetition, Dawe establishes to the audience that war is futile and effectively a waste of human life in an unending conflict. The constant use of the pronoun 'them' implies the worthlessness of the soldiers' identities and illustrates that war has stripped them of their humanity. The word 'day' is repeated to depict how days after days it is all the same monotonous routine of packing up unknown dead bodies. 'They're bringing them home, now,
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Conceptions of exploit and exposibility is constant in his text as he verbally expresses the truth, or what the public can receive. The poem, Homecoming, communicates the horrible aftermaths of war, categorically the Vietnam war and the effects on Australia, and our adolescence. Homecoming prospers in addressing the quandaries that the regime do not addressed in the promotional posters and propaganda spoon victualed to society, which we victual up expeditiously. Dawe, through this poem was to make us cognisant about the quandaries of war. On the Death of Ronald Ryan, alternatively was rather a homage to the last man executed in Australia, rather than being an exposing piece of text, though it does contain aspects that do explicate the powerlessness of society and the authentic power of the regime.

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Therefore this boycott led community is left in tatters. Bruce Dawe’s Homecoming concentrates on the trudges of the Vietnam war commenting on the

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Individuals upsurge their powers in society by developing their skills in speech that will eventually empowering over others and stimulating sense of powerlessness in individuals. In the case of Weapons Training, Dawe alerts responders the power of authority in a Sergeant’s potent speech with pejorative language, ‘unsightly fat between your elephant ears open that drain you call a mind’ as it insults the troops with graphic visual imageries as the brain been metaphorically personified and juxtaposed to the drain. This, combined with the assonance of the hyperbole, the persona is allowed to adapt a faster pace and to promote the intensive tone that hence, further accentuating the persona’s power. Moreover, the poem ends dramatically as Dawe states ‘you’re dead, dead, dead’, in which it foreshadows the recruits’ deaths and yet, reinforcing the crudity of wars and reality through the repetition of ‘dead’.

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