What conflict leaves behind: memory, grief and the people who were never there

A soldier writes home every week. Who reads his letter before his family does? It feels like nobody, because a letter home is private. In the First World War, officers read the letters soldiers sent home, and cut or blacked out anything that might help the enemy or lower morale. The soldiers also left things out themselves, so their families would not worry. So the people at home met the war at a distance, through other people's choices. Hardly anyone in the poems of this strand is fighting. A mother pins a poppy on a blazer. A photographer develops a film. A daughter tells her children about her father. The war is in every one of them anyway. How far each poem stands from the fighting turns out to be the key.

The claim, first: these poems show what conflict leaves behind, mostly on people who were not in the fighting, and every one is built on a distance from it. Each poet chooses a method to measure that distance, and four moves show how. Move one: Remains, where the distance is time. The soldier tries to close the story halfway through: "End of story, except not really." Going home should put distance between him and that street. It does not: "Then I’m home on leave. But I blink and he bursts again through the doors of the bank." One blink, and the weeks and the miles are gone. And the poem ends, months later and miles from the street, with "his bloody life in my bloody hands". The guilt arrives in slang, the only words he has for it. Move two: Poppies, where the distance is miles. Her son has gone to fight, and the mother is left at home, "hoping to hear your playground voice catching on the wind". She is listening for the wrong age of him. Miles from the fighting, the only part of the war she can touch is stone. "On reaching the top of the hill I traced the inscriptions on the war memorial, leaned against it like a wishbone." The names she traces belong to other families, and a wishbone is something you make a wish on. Which distance is Kamikaze built on: time, miles, or a camera lens? Time. A daughter tells the story to her own children long afterwards, so it reaches us second hand, and the pilot himself never speaks. That is move three. The survivor is punished at home, and the poem's last line is still a guess about him: "he must have wondered which had been the better way to die". Move four: War Photographer, where the distance is a lens and a page. The rest of us receive the conflict as "A hundred agonies in black-and-white", and an editor chooses five or six. Duffy gives the readers one moment of feeling: "The reader's eyeballs prick with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers." The grief fits between two parts of a Sunday morning, and then it is over. And the claim lands on Duffy's last line, "he earns his living and they do not care". The final distance is the reader's, and the poem puts us inside it. Now a different question: why might a poem get more precise the further it stands from the fighting? Because distance forces a choice of one small detail to carry everything: a playground voice, a face appearing in a developing tray, a blood-shadow on a street.

So the key is distance. Every poem in this strand is built on one, time, miles or a lens, and the method each poet chooses is how they measure it. That is why the comparison is about distance, not about sadness.

One examiner's report on Kamikaze listed the ways in: There were a number of ways to use the named poem as an invitation to write about the physical, the psychological and or emotional effects of conflict, including guilt, individual against collective, identity, responsibility, shame, effect on those directly involved as well as the wider impact on others, and imposed ideologies. All of these were handled with great maturity and sensitivity. The report is listing doors into this question. The habit is to pick one door, guilt or shame or the wider impact on others, and stay with it through both poems.

Now a practice question to plan: compare how two poets present the effect of conflict on someone who was not doing the fighting. Three steps help. Decide who is left holding the aftermath in each poem. Find how far each poem stands from the event. Then ask what each poem does with time. Try planning both poems now: who holds the aftermath, how far away, and the time. One plan uses War Photographer and Kamikaze. The claim: both show the aftermath held by people who were never in the fighting, at very different distances. War Photographer: the photographer and his readers hold it at a professional distance, miles away and through a lens, and the reader forgets by lunchtime. Kamikaze: a family holds it at the closest distance of all, inside one house, and the punishment is a silence that lasts for years. The ending: distance decides the response. Far away, the war becomes a page you can turn; close up, it becomes a silence nobody can leave. Two wrong turns to avoid. A detour into Japanese history leaves Kamikaze behind. And several sentences on one single verb lose the idea; step back to what the poem is saying, then choose the words that prove it.

Before the end, four questions on the strand; the final one uses a poem this video skipped. What are the three kinds of distance this strand is built on? Time, miles and a lens. Each poem measures the distance in its own way. Now Poppies: what kind of voice is the mother hoping to hear? His playground voice. She is hoping for the child, not the soldier. Try Remains: which line tries, and fails, to end the story? The line is "End of story, except not really", and the memory refuses to close. One more: The Emigree was not in this video. What distance is it built on? Time and miles. She left her country as a child, and her memory of its sunlight is how the poem measures how far away it is. In the First World War, an officer read a soldier's letter home before his family ever saw it. These poems are about the people at the end of that distance, and each one measures it differently.

Naming the distance each poem stands at means it's locked in; register that with a thumbs-up. Short of it, keep it saved and sort the poems into time, miles or a lens tonight.

Next in the chapter: The power of nature: the thing that does not know you are there. Hopefully that's next in your feed, but if not, search for ScholaFly E L four oh, two oh.

Every other video is on scholafly.com too, easy to search by video code or by keyword. Whatever you're revising, go there and have a look, or, watch the next video.