Question

How are literary devices used effectively in the poem war photographer?

Answer 1

The poem starts with a description of the war photographer standing alone in his dark room. All the photos that he had taken of the war are contained within the rolls which are organized into neat rows, making him feel like a priest who is about to lead a mass funeral. He thinks of all the places he has been to, places which had been torn apart by war, and remembering all the bloodshed he has witnessed he feels that everything has to in the end die and return to the earth. He then carries on with his works, but the ironical fact is that he who wasn’t afraid while amidst gunfire and death, now trembles in the safety and sanctuary of his home in Rural England, where the most troubling thing is the constantly changing weather and where he does not have to worry about the ground blowing up beneath his feet.

Answer 2

Duffy often taps into the symbolic associations of ordinary words. In the first stanza the photographer is in the 'darkroom' and the 'only light is red'. The process of developing a photograph is turned into something ominous.

Dark contains the idea of evil, moral darkness,and red is associated with blood. Similarly, 'ordered rows' would sound innocent enough in other contexts, but here it makes us think of graves, or bodies waiting to be buried.



Duffy makes it clear that these wars are happening across the world, from Europe (Belfast), to the Middle East (Beirut) to Asia (Phnom Penh).

What does the line 'All flesh is grass' suggest about how we value other human beings?

There is an effective contrast in the poem between what was happening in the places where the photographer has been and what is happening back home now:

War Zones England 'Fields... explode beneath the feet of running children in a nightmare heat' 'Ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel' 'A half-formed ghost' Sunday supplements 'A hundred agonies' 'The bath and pre-lunch beers' 'The cries of this man's wife' 'Rural England 'How the blood stained the foreign dust'