Explication of Diane Thiels The Minefield :: essays research papers

Diane Thiels poem The Minefield is about a creation whos mind has been ravaged by memories of a war in his childhood. She shows that til now though the war had been over for years, the memory of it haunted the humanity in everything that he did. Through a powerful combination of symbols, unsung images, and a split chronology, she creates a full picture of a behavior changed forever by war.In the first stanza, the tone is lighter, describing a icon where two boys are running through towns. The boys race, the faster one be described as a wild rabbit. This stanza feels dream like, the shaping of thought is loose, and word choice seems virtually erratic, almost unrehearsed. The first stanza ends with a twist. The faster boy is killed by a mine and his friend, just seconds behind, witnesses the intact thing.The second stanza is only two lines, My father told us this, one night,/and and then continued eating dinner. This stanza breaks up the chronology of the poem, pushing the previous stanza into the past, and making it disjointed, almost like another poem in itself. The result of the father keep eating after he tells the spirit level shows how dead he is inside, the recalling of the story no longer affecting him in the same way it does the ref and his own family. It is implied that he is the only one able to eat after telling the story. This short stanza foreshadows the fathers personality change.In the trinity stanza, the language becomes much darker, words like anger, explode, and against make this stanza seem even more warlike than the first stanza.