1943

No excuses this time as for why it's late. Life happens.

1943
-Donald Hall

They toughened us for war. In the high-school auditorium
Ed Monahan knocked out Dominick Esposito in the first round

of the heavyweight finals, and ten months later Dom died
in the third wave of Tarawa. Every morning of the war

our Brock-Hall Diary delivered milk from horse-drawn wagons
to wooden back porches in southern Connecticut. In winter

frozen cream lifted the cardboard lids of glass bottles,
Grade A or Grade B, while marines bled to death in the surf,

or the right engine faltered into Channel silt, or troops marched
-what could we do?-with frostbitten feet as white as milk.



Since this poem was already discussed in class, I'm not going to just say what I thought about this poem. I've been feeling patriotic this past week due to the 9/11 tenth anniversary, so I chose to blog about this poem.

I was reminded of a book I read called The All Americans by Lars Anderson, and its about young men who go through the naval academy and the military academy. No matter how prepared they thought they were heading into the war, nothing compared to what it was really like. Granted, there is a big difference between academies and heavyweight finals when it comes to preparing for war, but no one really knew what they were in for.

I love how the poet is able to create vivid pictures in the readers mind without using a lot of description. I think this is because the subject and setting are things that most readers have learned about and seen before. For example, the line "while marines bled to death in the surf," can remind the reader of a movie such as Saving Private Ryan, or of their Modern America class when their teacher showed pictures of Normandy Beach.

The question at the end, "what could we do?" makes me think about the significance of the poem. Milk is obviously important to the theme of the poem, but the question makes me think in a different way about the poem. To me, it almost makes the line say that people at home were helpless to the soldiers and  almost naïve towards helping them. Was the poet trying to say that people at home just continued on with their daily lives with fresh milk because they thought they couldn't do anything to help?