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This is a paper my 10th grade son wrote in response to Stephen Crane's poem, "Do Not Weep Maiden, For War is Kind."

 

While ds is my most well-read child, he is also my only one that struggles with spelling and grammar, in part, because he rushes to get his work done and is not particular about details. Could you please critique the work keeping in mind that he will not take AP English tests, but still needs to be able to write a competent analysis. You also do not need to be kind as I will sort out what I will share now and what we will work on over the summer. He is in public high school.

 

 

 

War is Kind

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Man has been going off to war for ages. They leave their wives and mothers to win honor, valor and glory on the battlefield. Most of the time they come home as heroes. They come home to their mothers and wives. Then there are those who come home in a box, never to see their loved ones again. People seem to forget that fact a lot. In Stephen Crane’s poem “Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.†He employs the help of irony, imagery, and refrain to show how war is depicted in glorious ways so that everyone forgets the pain it causes.

 

Crane’s poem practically drips with irony to drive his point home, that war cause pain that people forget about. He uses lines such as “Your lover threw wild hands toward the sky.†He tries to remind you that war steals the hearts of men from their lovers and the pain of them leaving intensifies when they learn that they have died. He reminds us of fathers, “ragged at his breast, gulped, and died,†who left their families behind to grieve and pray for them. These are two things that people experience every day and other people forget about because war has been spruced up in such a way that people forget about all that pain. He says it all in one irony drenched line, “war is kind.â€

 

Another device that the poet uses is imagery to show how war is glorified and depicted in such a way that it creates a shroud over the horror and terribleness of war. He almost paints a picture in your head of a “swift, blazing flag of the regiment,†and the “eagle with the crest of red and gold.†It’s almost like your their on the field wait to go to war. You hear the “hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,†calling you into a bloody fight. But amongst all of this the pain has been washed away like a bloodstain on uniform.

 

 

The last device that is used is refrain. Crane masterfully uses it to bring imagery and irony together to make this poem a very powerful and moving one. His first line is almost the definition of irony “Do not weep maiden, war is kind.†It makes the reader wonder how war can be kind. He repeats words from that line three more time in his poem. And it’s always right after he says something about the pain war causes. Then he describes war in an almost beautiful way. He sneaks in “these men who were born to drill and die†and “a field were a thousand corpses lie,†to shatter the images of war being wonderful to bring it back to the reality that war is terrible thing.

 

With the clever usage of irony, imagery, and refrain Crane has moved all the misconceptions of war away to reveal the gaping wound it leaves of people’s lives. The agony of seeing their loved ones going off to some place to die and kill for a cause they might not believe in. In fact I hope this poem will help people understand the true horrors of war and not what books and movies tell them.

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This is a paper my 10th grade son wrote in response to Stephen Crane's poem, "Do Not Weep Maiden, For War is Kind."

 

While ds is my most well-read child, he is also my only one that struggles with spelling and grammar, in part, because he rushes to get his work done and is not particular about details. Could you please critique the work keeping in mind that he will not take AP English tests, but still needs to be able to write a competent analysis. You also do not need to be kind as I will sort out what I will share now and what we will work on over the summer. He is in public high school.

 

 

 

War is Kind

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Man has been going off to war for ages. TheyThe number of the subject has changed from the previous sentence to this one. Also, "for ages" sounds trite in this context. leave their wives and mothers to win honor, valor You can't win valor--you have it in yorself, or you achieve it, but you can't win it.and glory on the battlefield. Most of the time they come home as heroes. They come home to their mothers and wives. Then there are those who come home in a box, never to see their loved ones again. People seem to forget that fact a lot. The preceding several sentences are choppy, giving the paragraph a juvenile sound. Find a way to either combine the sentences or develop them more fully to achieve a better flow.In Stephen Crane’s poem “Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.†He employs the help of irony, imagery, and refrain to show how war is depicted in glorious ways so that everyone forgets the pain it causes.

 

Crane’s poem practically drips with irony to drive his point home, that war cause pain that people forget about.Would be smoother as "to drive home his point that war causes pain that people forget about." I might also add the word or idea of deliberately forgetting the pain. He Again, the inconsistent subject of the paragraph: first the poem, then Crane himself. Choose one and stick with it.uses lines such as “Your lover threw wild hands toward the sky.†He tries to remind you Who is you? Should say "the reader."that war steals the hearts of men from their lovers and the pain of them leaving intensifies when they learn that they have died. He reminds us See previous commentof fathers, “ragged at his breast, gulped, and died,†who left their families behind to grieve and pray for them. These are two things that people experience every day and other people forget about because war has been spruced up in such a way that people forget about all that pain. He says it all in one irony drenched line, “war is kind.â€There is a strong tendency here toward the cliche and the misplaced intimacy of "you" and "us" in this paragraph. Again, this gives the sense of a younger writer, one still learning how to write an academic paper, rather than onw who has mastered the form, and is only working on polishing it.

 

Another device that the poet uses is imagery to show how war is glorified and depicted in such a way that it creates a shroudAn interesting word choice is this idea were more developed--potentially an excellent avenue for improving this paragraph. over the horror and terriblenessUgly word--find an alternative. of war. He almost paints a picture in your head Leave out the "in your head" part.of a “swift, blazing flag of the regiment,†and the “eagle with the crest of red and gold.†It’s almost like your their Wrong forms of these words.on the field waitWaiting to go to war. You hear the “hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,†calling you into a bloody fight. But amongst all of this the pain has been washed away like a bloodstain on uniform.A marvelous image! More like this!

 

 

The last device that is used Avoid the passive here, and combine this sentence with the following one.is refrain. Crane masterfully uses it to bring imagery and irony together to make this poem a very powerful and moving one. His first line is almost the definition of irony “Do not weep maiden, war is kind.†It makes the reader wonder how war can be kind. He repeats words from that line three more time in his poem. And it’s always right after he says something about the pain war causes. Then he describes war in an almost beautiful way. He sneaks in “these men who were born to drill and die†and “a field were a thousand corpses lie,†to shatter the images of war's being wonderful to bring it back to the reality that war is terrible thing.

 

With the clever usage of irony, imagery, and refrain Crane has moved all the misconceptions of war away to reveal the gaping wound it leaves ofIn people’s lives. The agony of seeing their loved ones going off to some place to die and kill for a cause they might not believe in.Fragment In fact I hope this poem will help people understand the true horrors of war and not what books and movies tell them.

The conclusion is fairly weak--it does not tie together the three main elements into a new, final idea to form a coherent whole, ie. nothing really new has been concluded within the essay. It feels undeveloped, unfinished.

There are some flashes of really excellent and perceptive expression, as in the choice of the word shroud and the image of the washing away of pain like a bloodstain, which, if further developed and brought to the fore, could really make the essay superb. I would advise trying to follow the MCT suggestion of careful selection of micro-language to give the essay a more coherent structure and to make it easier to draw out a new, whole idea from the component elements. I would also recommend rereading the essay, preferably aloud, with a view toward removing cliche and trite expressions, and reducing the juvenile tone. As it stands, the essay reads more as a recitation of poetic elements than as an essay which has a point in itself.

 

Lisa, I hope this is what you're looking for and that it doesn't come off as dismissive. I see the hurriedness in the writing, but also see real potential with more effort. :001_smile:

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I agree with Caitilin's comment that the essay reads more as a recitation of poetic elements than as an essay which has a point in itself. The strongest feeling I had when reading the essay was that there was not a thesis or central point to the writing.

 

I do think the essay has some strong points, but they aren't pulled together coherently. I would suggest that your son take a look at the paper with the intent of presenting a particular point of view, and that he tries to make his opening and conclusion mirror the points in the body of the paper. Overall, he has the start of a well-written paper, but it needs some polish. You could point out to him that the hard work is already done. :)

 

War is Kind

Man has been going off to war for ages. They "They" is not proper here; "man" is used as a singular verb in the first sentence, while "they" is plural. leave their wives and mothers to win honor, valor and glory on the battlefield. Most of the time they come home as heroes. I don't know that this is true, so this sentiment might be better expressed by saying "While some men come home as heroes..." or "Many may come home as heroes to their mothers and wives, but..."They come home to their mothers and wives. Then there are those who come home in a box, never to see their loved ones again. People seem to forget that fact a lot. In Stephen Crane’s poem “Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.†Fragment; what happens in Stephen Crane's poem?He employs the help of irony, imagery, and refrain to show how war is depicted in glorious ways so that everyone forgets the pain it causes.

 

Crane’s poem practically drips with irony to drive his point home, that war cause "war" is singular while "cause" is pluralpain that people forget about. He uses lines such as “Your lover threw wild hands toward the sky.†He tries to remind you that war steals the hearts of men from their lovers and the pain of them leaving intensifies when they learn that they have died. Hard sentence to follow; lots of "theirs"/"thems"/"they" make it difficult to keep the people distinct.He reminds us of fathers, “ragged at his breast, gulped, and died,†who left their families behind to grieve and pray for them. This is unclear - did the fathers leave to grieve their families, or is the reader supposed to grieve for the families whose fathers left?These are two things that people experience every day and other people forget about because war has been spruced up in such a way that people forget about all that pain. Redundant use of the phrase "forget about" in this sentence.He says it all in one irony drenched line,I believe this should be a colon, not a comma. “war is kind.â€

 

Another device that the poet uses is imagery to show how war is glorified and depicted in such a way that it creates a shroud over the horror and terribleness use a thesaurus to find a better wordof war. He almost paints a picture in your head of a “swift, blazing flag of the regiment,†and the “eagle with the crest of red and gold.†It’s almost like your should be "you are"their should be "there"on the field waitshould be "waiting" to go to war. You hear the “hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,†calling you into a bloody fight. But amongst all of this the pain has been washed away like a bloodstain on uniform.

 

 

The last device that is used is refrain. Crane masterfully uses it to bring imagery and irony together to make this poem a very powerful and moving one. His first line is almost the definition of irony I believe there should be a colon here following "irony."“Do not weep maiden, war is kind.†It makes the reader wonder how war can be kind. He repeats words from that line three more time in his poem. And it’s always right after he says something about the pain war causes. Then he describes war in an almost beautiful way. He sneaks in “these men who were born to drill and die†and “a field were should be "where"a thousand corpses lie,†to shatter the images of war being wonderful you need a conjunction ("and") here to bring it I think "it" would better be written as "the reader," or something along those lines. back to the reality that war is terrible thing.

 

With the clever usage of irony, imagery, and refrain Crane has moved all the misconceptions of war away to reveal the gaping wound it leaves of people’s lives. The agony of seeing their loved ones going off to some place to die and kill for a cause they might not believe in. This sentence seems out of place. The first sentence of the paragraph talks about poetic form, then the second sentence jumps into a fragment regarding the pain people feel.In fact I hope this poem will help people understand the true horrors of war and not what books and movies tell them.The "books and movies" phrase seems out of place, because it is the first mention of books or movies in the piece.

 

Shelly

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I disregarded some things that Caitlin and Shelly had brought up for the sake of avoiding repetition.

to win honor, valor and glory on the battlefield.

Romanticised stereotyping generalizations are not a good thing, even if used to show such thinking, if they are presented nearly factually. "Honor, valor and glory" almost sound like propaganda here. :tongue_smilie: I get what he is trying to say, but it needs to be more realistic, the image presented here is too romanticised. As this is a general statement, he needs to word it differently.

Most of the time they come home as heroes.

Do they? This is too bold a statement to present it as a factual one, like the previous one too.

He employs the help of

Maybe "he employs XYZ", not "employs the help of XYZ", that sounds a bit odd to me.

He tries to remind you that

Never, ever, read into the author's mind. Speak of what he wrote, not of what he wanted or tried to do with it. Too bold claims at this level of education.

He almost paints a picture in your head

"Your" (or "us" previously, etc.) is too informal.

His first line is almost the definition of irony

Exemplary irony, maybe, but not the definition of it, strictly speaking.

He repeats words from that line three more time in his poem. And it’s always right after he says something about the pain war causes.

Combine into one sentence.

Crane has moved all the misconceptions of war away to reveal the gaping wound it leaves of people’s lives.

Attributing too much to a poet: moved all the misconceptions on such a complex topic, revealed the obvious truth, etc. Avoid it, it sounds nearly servile.

In fact I hope this poem will help people understand the true horrors of war and not what books and movies tell them.

A rather simplifying and patronizing conclusion: people will read a poem and "understand" things? I also do not get where books and movies enter the picture, as they are not previously brought up.

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For what it's worth, I think it's a mistake at this point to focus on grammatical infelicities. The major problem with much high school level literary analysis, especially of poetry, is that kids need to learn how to talk about the formal elements of literature. When they don't understand how to do that, they fall back on summarizing the poem, quoting lines without discussing them, talking about how the poem moved them, or trying to talk about sensory images by saying things like, "You can almost hear..." or "The poet paints a picture of..."

 

Please note that I'm not saying this writer does all these things; these are just common moves kids fall back on in a desperate attempt to fill up that page or that paragraph (I've taught high school English, freshman writing in the University of California, under grad and grad lit classes). A tenth grader won't have a good idea of how to deal otherwise with poetic elements -- many college undergraduates don't, and I count myself among one of them when I was an undergrad -- but he can begin to figure out how to do so.

 

Your son has a really good intuitive grasp of how the poem works; he knows it is based on irony, and that in some way the irony is rooted in contrasts. He knows that one of the elements is some kind of glorification of war, and the other is a depiction of its ugly realities. That's a wonderful start -- and this should constitute his thesis rather than the general reference to irony, images, and repetition. He just needs to know where to go from there.

 

I'd have him pick one word that exemplifies the glorification of war. Then begin a list of other words that go with that one: glory, great, kingdom, swift, blazing, crest, eagle, etc. Then make a list of contrasting words: hoarse, wild, unexplained, corpses, gulped, slaughter, and others.

 

He mentions imagery, so do the same thing. Start with one image, perhaps the eagle on the standard. What things seem to "go" with the eagle? then make a contrasting list, which will contain items like "humble as a button."

 

Another contrast, which your son mentions but does not develop, is that between the masculine experience of the field of war and the female experience of its aftermath, its consequences. There are contrasting sets of words here, too: "weep," which is what women do, vs. "raged, gulped, died," which is what male soldiers do; "splendid shroud" vs. "humble as a button" -- a very domestic image.

 

Now he's got a handle on two different languages, two different systems of images, two sets of referents (soldiers/women). The next step is to learn how to not only quote the poem, but to do something with that quote. He might start by thinking about the difference between the word "gold," referring to the eagle, and "yellow," referring to the dirt of the battlefield. How would it be different if the words and their referents were exchanged? One set of words and images elevates the whole notion of war, makes it abstract and thrilling, setting up people like the unnamed soldier for a march into almost certain death ("a thousand corpses," "slaughter"). The other set of words and images, more realistic and grim, is juxtaposed with the elevated language to create the speaker's ironic stance and construct the poem's anti-war message. Another set deals with various references to height, greatness, or a kind of publicity, vs. the lonely, the humble, the domestic.

 

If he's really interested, there's a further contrast between the linear narrative of the soldier's path to death -- first falling off the horse, then tumbling into the trenches, then dying, then being buried -- vs. the repetitive, circular narrative which introduces various female characters weeping. Structurally, the repetition of phrases like "Do not weep" and "War is kind" are interspersed between bits of linear narrative. The linear narrative in turn is broken by the speaker's comments on the ways in which the elevated rhetoric of war's glory makes men willing to die. It's really kind of curious; there seem to be a whole lot of voices and different experiences crowding into the poem, the speaker being one of them, with his attitude of sardonic detachment and ironic commentary. The fact that the speaker is standing outside and above all the main actors in the war drama is important, because it gives him a plausible stance from which to critique the language that in a sense generates the whole scenario. At the same time, he seems to sometimes be standing for the kinds of people who create that language. "Do not weep" and "War is kind" are both simplistic and condescending -- not to mention absolutely false in the latter case -- phrases to give to people who have lost fathers, husbands, lovers. So in a sense the speaker himself embodies the dualities present in the different uses of language, the image systems, the experiences of soldiers vs. families.

 

Again, I wouldn't expect a tenth grader to be able to figure out and analyze all these things on his own, or for all of them to be explored in a single paper. I'm trying to give you a kind of list of elements to consider -- language, structure, speaker, images -- and ways a high schooler might be guided to a deeper level of thinking about them.

 

Now he can go back and write an introduction, which is always easier to do afterwards. Have him read the short essay on Crane in the Norton Anthology of American Literature on on Wikipedia or some other on-line source. (Has your son read The Red Badge of Courage, or at least heard of it?) He'll find that much of Crane's writing is committed to a realistic vision, an anti-romantic vision of aspects of American culture. Rather than making sweeping statements about "throughout history" or "all men," as high school kids are very prone to do, he can start by introducing Crane and his typical approach to crucial political and cultural issues, then talk about this particular poem as an exemplar of Crane's realism. He's now set up to move smoothly into a thesis statement about this poem using a juxtaposition of two sets of images and two "kinds" of language to create the speaker's ironic and anti-romantic stance.

 

I wouldn't even look at grammar or wording until your student has gone through this process and has a stronger notion of how to talk about literary aspects of a text. I'd expect the language and grammar to need a lot of cleaning up, even if the writer were not a child who tends to rush through things, as you say, and not pay attention to details. When anyone is struggling with a new, difficult, abstract and sophisticated subject matter, writing about it tends to be even more difficult. When I was in grad school, my colleagues and I all felt that our writing competence dropped several levels as we struggled to cope with expressing ideas we were just coming to terms with and didn't completely understand. That's okay; it's a process. Leave the cleaning up until the editing stage.

 

I hope this is helpful for anyone who has a high school student, homeschooled or not, attempting to figure out just what there is to say about how a poem works. Again, I think your son has a sharp intuitive understanding about what's going on in the poem, and it's a matter of helping him move from that to how to lay that out in an essay.

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I hope this is helpful for anyone who has a high school student, homeschooled or not, attempting to figure out just what there is to say about how a poem works. Again, I think your son has a sharp intuitive understanding about what's going on in the poem, and it's a matter of helping him move from that to how to lay that out in an essay.

 

I'm not the OP, but thank you for taking the time to explain this. It was incredibly helpful.

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