Compare and contrast the view of war presented in John McRae’s “In Flanders Fields” and Sara Teasdale’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.”
Answers
Answer:
The poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” is written by the poet Sara Teasdale in the year 1920. The poem is about the nature after the battlefield. Though, there remain some people alive but is was also vanished after the invention of the nuclear weapons.
The poem “In Flanders Fields” is written by the poet John McRae in the year 1915. The poem is about the environment after the war. After world War I, nothing was left. The battlefield was turned into a cemetery.
Both Sara Teasdale and John McRae wrote these poems during/at the time of World War I, wherein they have shown different views/perceptions of death of the people that took place during the WW1.
EXPLANATION:
Sara Teasdale’s poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” envisages nature re-claiming a battleground after the combat is over. The poem refers to the idea of human extermination by war, which was not an everyday idea until the discovery of nuclear weapons, twenty-five years later. The key theme is that the beauty of nature will continue uninterrupted in spite of humanity perishing completely.
That is, the extinction of mankind does not change anything in the world, and while people go, the natural world remains unaffected. According to the poet, war is futile and if we carry on fighting like it was done in World War I, we are sure to accomplish nothing but our destruction.
In John McRae’s poem “In Flanders Field’, refers to preoccupation with death and in what way it stands as the evolution between the challenges of life and the harmony which follows. It is written from the viewpoint of the dead, that is, about honoring the war dead. It also speaks of their martyr and acts as a directive to the living to precede, that is, a plea for men to understand where their duty lies, and to take up the places of the dead and wounded.