How irony is revealed in the poem "john brown"?
Answers
Explanation:
John Brown is a poem that blisters with anti-war sentiments. It has satire, irony, pathos, and a barely-concealed appeal to the readers to see the futility of wars. Like all mothers, John Brown’s mother wanted her son to return home with gallantry medals hanging from his chest. She was naive, and ill-informed. In wars, soldiers die painful deaths. Only a miniscule number survive and are decorated. John Brown survived and returned with medals, but for the rest of his life, he would hate wars. Such was his tragedy. Bob Dylan seems to have captured the emotions of a WW1 soldier with remarkable sincerity. That’s why, his underlying message appears so powerful.
John Brown, like the only son of Rudyard Kipling, heard a highly romanticized version of war from his mother. War was portrayed as honorable, chivalrous, patriotic, and masculine. Every young man should cherish a chance to fight for their motherland. It was an utterly convoluted perception cultivated by the war-time leaders. But, the realities of the battlefield, the slush, the mangled body parts of friends, and the roar of enemy guns nearby completely disorients a young soldier. Kipling, was so disenchanted with the war that he wrote,
And there lay gentlemen from out of all the seas
That ever called him King.
‘Twixt Nieuport sands and the eastward lands where the Four Red Rivers spring,
Five hundred thousand gentlemen of those that served their King.
”
— from the poem “The King’s Pilgrimage”, by Rudyard Kipling[7]
Brown survived the war unlike Rudyard Kipling’s son, but he was too crippled to be identified even by his mother. The bedraggled son drops his war medals on his mother and walks off. The irony of this scene is hard to ignore.
In the same way, one can refer to Alfred Owen’s poem where he writes,
“My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.”
Wilfred Owen wrote these lines in May 1918. He has escaped death, and had come home badly bruised, just like John Brown.
In all the three cases cited above, it is the mothers who bore the worst fate. Kipling’s son died in the battlefield. Owen suffered the same fate. Only John Brown could manage to return.
BoB Dylan is a non-conventional person who wants to sing and dance with his audience. So, he picks up themes that are universal in appeal. Before the war, nationalistic sentiments are whipped up to reach a crescendo, and thousands of un-suspecting young men jump to the fray, only to be disillusioned soon as the war’s ugly face unfolds.
Bob Dylan’s poem touches a raw nerve in the readers’ minds and convinces them about the futility of war. So, we all owe Bob a sense of gratitude for driving home this message so effectively.
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