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Oscar Gonzalez
English 309
Hemingway Essay
In the poems by Ernest Hemingway, has really shown different uses of death. Clearly
while his pome are about the war, there should be death involved. He definitely repeats the
portrayal of the theme death and dying in the wars during his poems. To get a better
understanding on what Hemingway is trying to tell his readers on why it was kept repeating, I
had to read the poems several times. Some of the poems being very short was challenging to
break down because of how short it is. The shorter poems are usually the difficult compared to
the larger because the author usually gives us a small amount of words to work with. Before
going into the four poems that really thought to be looked at more than three times, I want to just
give an overall of how the poems and which ones I found to be difficult to read.
One of the poems that were really short but got a good understanding on what
Hemingway was trying to say was the poem called “D’Annunzio”. With this poem only being
three lines, one can clearly see how this relates to the war. The theme death is written all over
this and this “death” into this context is actually lives being lost and no seems to care. Instead of
caring, there were people that actually got a laugh because of the lives lost. “Half a million dead
wops/And he got a kick out of it/The son of a bitch” (“D’Annunzio”, 1-3). The way death or
dying was used in this poem was in the way where it is obvious on how lives were lost and it was
humor towards a person. This poem definitely means dead bodies. The word choices that was
chosen for this person helps us readers know that some person involved in the war is not the only
one that gets a kick from people dying. Just by seeing how there is curse words involved seems
that there is hate for that person and also gives us the idea that this person was evil. Most of his
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other poems besides this one has death involved as a theme but it is used in a different context. In
the poem “Captives”, this poem explained on how prisoners lived in captivity. I believe while
being held as prisoners by the enemy, I feel like the prisoners are already dead. What I am trying
to say is that they know that being free is not an option anymore. “Some came in chains
/Unrepentant but tired/ Too tired to stumble/ Thinking and hating were finished/ Thinking and
fighting were finished” (“Captives”, 1-5). Now this is an example of showing death in a
different way. Being chained up may feel like they are trapped forever . In the poem it mentions
how being chained up and being constantly tired is a way of dying easy. This is just a way of
Hemingway to show how people suffered. Some of his other poems also seems to show the
theme of suffering and not just death.
Hemingway had a way of explaining death in his poems, but not all literally had people
