War Poetry

Dawe here dramatises the homecoming of Australian veterans' bodies from Vietnam. This is clearly an anti-war poem, reproducing in the seventies the sentiments of the First World War poets.

In 25 lines of broken verse presented in one demanding stanza, Dawe recounts how "they are bringing" home the bodies "in deep freeze lockers"... zipped up "in green plastic bags" "bringing them home, now, too late." He picks out the rituals and consequences of this event on a relatively stable and uncaring society back home (in Australia). Ironically, he celebrates their coming home across the curvatures of the globe and across the international borders as they fly homeward bound. Homecomings are usually consoling and familiar particularly in the American culture where "home' acquires very many strong associations of rest, trust and identity. But here the term is deliberately turned upside down as the dead return home - a telling commentary on the VN war and what it destroyed.

The diction is plain like prose, the pace is relentless and the tone is ironic. The drama of the historic present moment is expressed in many present participles: "picking... bringing....rolling ... whining..." In 25 lines, the poet drives us across many details, many particulars in the fixed drama of death. Dawe's point of view is not uncritical. We are enjoined not to be passionless spectators but to feel this great injustice to our young men. The irony is that the young are brought back to the old ridiculous curvatures of our old continent's coasts and into the cities and small towns where they were raised. Thus a spider web of grief "in his bitter geometry" spreads across the land catching us all.

Dawe uses powerful oxymorons to highlight the bitterness and irony of what is happening: "sorrowful quick fingers heading south", and "bringing them home now, too late, too early" to emphasise that their return is premature and "the mash, the splendour" their napalm deaths are unnatural paradoxes. Dawe drives home the conviction that the whole war is a contradiction: "(dead) fingers are tracing a course southwards" and "the howl of their homecoming" (in the jet engines) mocks a ticker tape parade they are owed if they had returned as homecoming living victors. No wonder they receive only "mute salute" from dogs not their fellow countrymen.

I like it when a poem has a central focus. Dawe's deft writing plays powerful chords on our emotions: the injustice of killing young men and its overwhelming reality is delivered in many observable details. Rather than say I enjoyed this poem, let me say I appreciate what it is doing and rate it a powerful indictment of Australian involvement in Vietnam. It is a memorable poem.

2.

In "Homecoming", poet Bruce Dawe uses vivid visual and aural poetic techniques to construct his attitudes towards war. He creates a specifically Australian cultural context where soldiers have been fighting in a war in Vietnam, and the dead bodies flown home. However the poem has universal appeal in that the insensitivity and anonymity accorded to precious lives reduced to body bags are common attitudes towards soldiers in all historical conflicts. Although Dawe makes several references to the Vietnam War, the sense of moral outrage at the futile, dehumanising aspects of war is a universal theme. He also speaks on behalf of the mute, dead soldiers who have no way of expressing their suffering and loss of