GCSE ANTHOLOGY AQA CONFLICT CLUSTER

come on, come back

WHAT IS IT ABOUT• Stevie Smith draws on past events such as the

“Austerlitz” war to create the idea that nations making decisions, would effect the lives of ordinary people in towns and villages across the world.

• He designs a future war, which has elements related to past, and present, but also future elements.

THE WRITER’S AIMS/FEELINGS

• Stevie is obviously against conflict - he created this poem to outline the dangers of war and the effects that it has by using the vivid imagery of a girl drowning.

• I believe that he is trying to show the horrors of war and perhaps he feels that war will carry on in the future to have horrible outcomes, such as the girl having no memory.

THE POETIC TECHNIQUES• Smith uses rhymes mid sentence to show both the disorder of the

situation and possibly to show that things aren’t as they should be - it could also relate to her having no memory, so she could be panicking and her body may not be functioning as expected.

• When Stevie writes “she strips her uniform off, strips, stands”, he repeats the word “strips”. He could have done this to show Vaudevue’s disordered and scrambled mind and loss of memory by repetition.

• The poet could have used the name “Vaudevue” to relate to “vaudeville”, which is a type of variety of entertainment which grouped several different, unrelated acts together to perform - perhaps Stevie (by using this name) is suggesting that people who go to war are so different, yet they are treated as numbers, and as having a “black mind” and possibly referring to soldiers as numbers rather than treating them as real people.