Analysis Of Facing It By Yuself Komanyakaa

“Facing It” by the American black poet Yusef Komunyakaa of Shreveport is written with the use of visual images. Yusef Komunyakaa writes about one of his many trips to the Vietnam's Veteran's Memorial in Washington DC. This Memorial is a long polished slab of black reflectant granite with the names of all the US soldiers who lost their lives in Vietnam. Yusef says “my black face fades, hiding inside the black granite”. Here Yusef uses his reflection in the wall to bring the reader back to the war and how he feels standing at the wall now. He makes his feeling ambiguous and give the reader the opportuntity to decide what he is feeling through his use of viual images.

He struggles to internalize his emotions, telling himself he is stone, like the granite memorial, a strong and steady reminder of the past, but he fails as he realizes the difference between him and the memorial: he is a living human being. He shares the darkness, the blackness, with the granite memorial, yet he can feel the full impact of this connection whereas a granite memorial cannot itself feel the pain that it directly represents. The overall moral of the poems is fairly up front for the reader. It is that war is not how stories make it sound, it is not honorable and fun and glorious, it is gruesome, deadly, and changes the lives of many young men and women who still had a lot of life and innocence left in front of them, and now all they will have are the memories of death and their friends dying in front of them. As Komuyakaa face becomes clear it now serves as a direct reminder of the emotional impact of his surroundings upon him, through mirroring his own face and also by simultaneously illuminating his surroundings and his silhouetted existence within these surroundings, reminding him that he stands within the Vietnam Memorial. This effect is described within the (lines 8-13) His constant turning and moving from angle to angle also suggests emotion as he cannot view the

War is devastating and tragic. It affects the daily lives of the people that are involved in the war. In the excerpt from, A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, it displays a man who is dreaming about war. When the man wakes up, he lays sweating on the ground, remembering the painful memories that the dream has brought. In the end, the man realizes that from now on he will have to live in three worlds; his dreams, the experience of his new life, and memories from the past. Meanwhile, in the image, “In Times of War” by The New York Times, there is an angel on a cloud looking over the dreadful war. Then the angel walks away because the view of people dying makes it sick. The theme of the excerpt A Long Way Gone, and the image, “In Times of War,” is that the war brings death, seriously injured, and psychologically broken people.

Second, striking similes are used throughout the whole poem. The speaker does not content himself with using age-old phrases or comparisons. His similes are unique and gripping. "Like old beggars under sacks," "like a man in fire or lime," and "like a devil's sick of sin," help to add vivid mental pictures to the poem. The soldier's uniforms are ripped and threadbare from all the fighting, and they are so exhausted that they bend over as they walk. The man that breathed the mustard gas is in such incredible pain that all he can do is jerk about as if he were on fire. After a while, the gas causes his face to sag until he resembles something from the horrors of hell. The speaker's similes are ones that cause the reader to stop and just think about what is being described

In the poems of “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Facing It” written by Wilfred Owen and Yusef Komunyakaa respectively, two entirely different yet similar stories of war are told. “Dulce et Decorum Est” is told through the perspective of our narrator as he’s directly in the middle of a war and of the horrors he sees. From the unforgiving terrain to the description of the already beaten down soldiers, and quickly followed up with a gas attack, it is not a pretty picture. The poem tells of the soldiers scrambling to put their helmets on to shield them from the gas, but not all of them make it. One soldier helplessly fumbles with his helmet and does not manage to put it on in time. The images of his friend choking and drowning are all too real for

Cruel and terrible events forever leave a mark on our memory. Especially, when these events are directly related to person, the memory reproduces every second of what happened. Unfortunately, humanity fully cognized the term of "war". "Facing it" by Yusef Komunyakaa reveals another several sides of the war. Poem tells the reader about which consequences, the war left and how changed people's lives. The hero identifies itself with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, mourns all those killed and who did not return. That is why the poem is dramatic. War has become a part of the hero's life, even after the ending.

He writes of a white veteran who approaches him while at the wall. With his effort to point out that it was a white veteran shows us that the speaker understands that the war didn’t just effect himself or African Americans, but all that were involved. He then uses some visual imagery to help us envision this white veteran and how he looked at the speaker by saying “his pale eyes/look through mine” (lines 26-27). Then, with the metaphor “I’m a window”, he expresses how, since being at the memorial wall, his self-perception has now lessened even more (line 27). Now he is neither stone nor flesh, but now a window through which this white veteran looks at the wall. He doesn’t even see the speaker, but obviously has his own harsh experiences of the war as he looks through the speaker at the wall. With this visual imagery and metaphoric language the speaker helps us understand how he feels about the war and the affects it’s had on him and all others that were involved.

“Facing it” by Yusef Komunyakaa and “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, are 2 great poems written in the perspective of soldiers who experienced disturbance of war. In “Dulce et Decorum Est” Owen talks about his experience in World War 1, taking the reader inside the actual event and giving them the insight on his feelings watching his fellow troops die. In “Facing it”, Komunyakaa also discusses his feeling towards his fellow troops who didn’t survive the attack but he also sheds light on his racial identity. Komunyakaa talks more of his feeling about the Vietnam War while visiting a memorial as oppose to describing the actual event. In "Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa and Wilfred Owen 's “Dulce et Decorum Est," the poets use various literary techniques to express their traumatic experiences of war. Without these literary devices, the poems would not be as powerful and effective in expressing how war mentally damaged them.

“Facing It” a powerful sonnet, brings both exact and metaphorical meanings to the reader. As seen in “I see the booby trap’s white flash,” (18) where there is no room for a different interpretation, but a flashback; which invites the reader into the world of war. It is up to the vet to see himself as something other than a man of war and the Vietnam Memorial allows them to release their pain into the stone, the black granite; releasing the empty pain that is carried for years. “[H]alf-expecting to find / my own [name] in the letter” (15, 16) and the portrayal of “I am a window” (27) allows others to see through the vet what a veteran took away from the war. Not all came back whole either mind or body and Komunyakaa displays this within the reference of “his right arm / inside the stone” (28, 29) and how this soldier wishes the names and pain could be erased by the simple movement of a

The personification used in this passage juxtaposes itself. The usage of personification began very sullen and then transformed to being serene. The motif of night and stars is profoundly highlighted in the usage of personification: war preparing itself at night and stars swimming between clouds. The first sentence of the passage set the mood, whereas the stars swimming between the clouds juxtaposes how the mood first began. By adding contradictory personification, it illustrates the battle between positivity and malice.

Yusef Komunyakaa, born in 1947, wrote both February in Sydney and Facing it. These poems were written as a way of “talking around an idea or question,” this idea/ question being that of growing up during the civil rights movement. His poetical technique makes his opinions stand out, being affluencial because although poems contain less words they often have a more powerful appeal. Komunyakaa was especially influenced by jazz and the time that he served in the Vietnam War. He creates his poem February In Sydney to mimic that freedom that he felt through jazz similar to that of meditation. In Facing it he bases the poem on flashbacks of the war while visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Poets frequently utilize vivid images to further depict the overall meaning of their works. The imagery in “& the War Was in Its Infancy Then,” by Maurice Emerson Decaul, conveys mental images in the reader’s mind that shows the physical damage of war with the addition of the emotional effect it has on a person. The reader can conclude the speaker is a soldier because the poem is written from a soldier’s point of view, someone who had to have been a first hand witness. The poem is about a man who is emotionally damaged due to war and has had to learn to cope with his surroundings. By use of imagery the reader gets a deeper sense of how the man felt during the war. Through the use of imagery, tone, and deeper meaning, Decaul shows us the

Veterans are more susceptible to the memories of war, pain, suffering, and death. Memorials such as the Vietnam Memorial bring back many memories for veterans when they view these memorials. Those memories can attack the mind, and cause a veteran to feel vulnerable. Many veterans can only associate those memorials with the pain, suffering, and death that they had seen while at war. Yusef Komunyakaa expresses the pain that is felt within war veterans when they remember memories of war and survival in his poem "Facing It."

The mental implications of war on the soldiers challenged the way they functioned day to day. In the ‘Next War’ Owen demonstrates the mental implications through personifying death and engaging the responder with sensory imagery.

The point of the poem was to deliver the horrors of war to the public