Question

Theme of them poem "after blenheim "

Answer 1

War represents the worst form of human behavior: “man's inhumanity to man" (a phrase originated by poet Robert Burns). The skull Peterkin finds, as well as those that Kaspar regularly unearths while plowing, are mute testimony to the truth of this observation. The poem implies that the perpetrators of war cannot or will not suppress wayward ambitions that provoke a violent response. The children—as yet uncorrupted by adult thinking—readily perceive war for what it makes.

After finding the skull, Peterkin immediately asks what it is. Kaspar tells him that it is part of the remains of a soldier who died at Blenheim. Wilhelmine then asks Kaspar to describe the war and explain its causes. Kaspar can describe what the war was like at Blenheim, but he cannot explain why the belligerents went to war. Nor does he seem curious about the causes. All that matters to him is that Austria and England won a glorious victory.

.......Old Kaspar unquestioningly accepts the loss of innocent women and children in the Battle of Blenheim as one of the prices of the glorious victory. His complacent attitude is not unlike that of modern politicians who dismiss the deaths of innocent civilians in arenas of war by referring to them with the impersonal phrase “collateral damage."

Answer 2

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Southey's poem After Blenheim is an anti-war poem. ... In the poem we see that Old Kaspar repeatedly mentions the Battle of Blenheim as a great and famous victory but he does not know the reason. He has a romantic view of war even after receiving the sufferings himself during the war and after thousands of killings.