Irony In Crane's War Is Kind

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In the poem “War is Kind”, Crane is using an abundance of irony and sarcasm through the speaker to poignantly emphasize his true bitterness about war, as it is very hard to imagine war being kind in any way. He is in a sense mocking the way the men were taught to believe that war is something that brave men do, in other words that it is a man's destiny to go to war. Going to war is seen as not only noble but imperial as well, and that by going to war these men are somewhat of a hero. Throughout the poem there is a general feeling of despair, the reader can relate to how war is cruel and unkind. Crane is really portraying in this poem the wrong and toxic glorification of the war through verbal irony.
As many can tell “War is Kind” is not about …show more content…
This lead to the poem having very odd slant rhymes at times, which could be related to and compared to the chaos of the war. War is kind was written in free verse to give the readers an easy way to read the story without it sounding too rhymey and forced. As T.S. Elliot once said, “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job”. The line lengths vary and it makes it very chaotic as stated above but that could be the work of a genius making his writing style close in relation to the feel of the story. The poem “War is Kind”, is filled with imagery, symbolism and plenty of other literary devices. For example, the reader can see that “Do not weep” is said over and over again, this would be because it is part of the refrain. Yet again the reader can see it is ironic that the speaker of the story tells people not to weep over and over again because that is what you do when you lose someone close and dear to you. The imagery the reader can see during the war would be when the rider-less horse appears portraying the image of a lost soldier, and in line 13 the yellow trenches are mentioned and yellow is a color that usually associated with death and
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