Question

similarities between old man at bridge and after blenheim

Answer 1

Robert Southey’s ‘After Blenheim‘ is an anti-war poem. The poet has depicted the destruction that war can cause through a conversation about a past battle — the Battle of Blenheim. Skulls are found here and there in the former battlefield when people plough the field or the children play there — suggestive of the sheer reality of death of thousands of people in the war.

Old Kasper in the poem narrates how a lot of people were forced to flee from there as their houses were set to fire. The speaker Kasper himself experienced that misery when his father fled with him and his mother. And they were probably wandering on streets as they had no place to stay.