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Analysis Of ' From The Frontier Of Writing ' And Yusef Komunyakaa 's Starlight Scope Myopia

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Michelle Ma Professor Neil Kortenaar ENGB04 31 March 2015 Masking the Meaning: The View from Opposite Ends of a Gun What may be one of the most significant effects to take away from poetry is how it is not always trying to convey only one idea, but how it uses the image of one concept to bring forth another. In this case, both Seamus Heaney’s “From the Frontier of Writing” and Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Starlight Scope Myopia” are excellent examples of how this is done. In Heaney’s poem, war is used as a metaphor for writing while in Komunyakaa’s poem, attention is brought to the effect of war from the perspective of a soldier on the battlefield. Both poems use the images of war as a medium to deliver a different outlook on different subjects. However, how both poems do this is also very different in how each poet chooses to mask the subject and how the details are presented in order to align both the emotions of the reader and those of the speaker. One of the most notable aspects in “From the Frontier of Writing” is its method of introducing the process of writing and associating it with the description of a war-like setting. It is written in a way where one may not even notice the association to the writing process; in fact, aside from the title, writing is mentioned only once in the entire poem. “So you drive on to the frontier of writing/ where it happens again. […]” (13-14). The only obvious indication that the poem may be about writing is in the title and its one mention in

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