Wazzy's Analysis of Civil War Photograph

Civil War Photograph

Flesh and blood turn mathematic.
The limbs illustrate opaque angles,

the sky rotates three hundred sixty
degrees around eyes burning

black zeros into its center. The light
is solid geometry, testing the premises

of interlocking masses: rifle stocks
that won't be stripped of hands,

legs nesting among the salley branches,
brocades mounting bones, sheer

vests and their torsos intersecting
brambles, plains crawling forward

into the smoke. The scratched lens
is a blackboard solving equations,

each one for its elusive X: maybe
a single cell regrouping, maybe the tasteless

cleanup of an unrelenting sun, maybe a wild
animal tracking fresh scent into focus.

War is a classic event used in poetry today. It is something that anybody could imagine given the proper use of imagery. James Doyle has done a fantastic job capturing the essence of somebody who has returned to a battlefield after death has occurred. The images he uses don’t describe a soldier in battle, rather a man who is examining the aftermath in an attempt to uncover what has happened. The narrator of this poem seems to be looking at a blood soaked battlefield ready to capture the moment with his camera.

I love the fact that this poem makes a statement in the first line and then proceeds to use language that refers back to the first line. “Flesh and blood turn mathematic” illustrates the type of person that is examining the battlefield. It seems as if it is a scholar who is looking at the mangled bodies trying to understand. He speaks in a purely analytical sense and makes countless references to the “mathematic” appearance of the scene. The second verse  uses mathematical terms to create the image of wounded soldiers staring up at the sky for days on end. The fact that the sky had rotated three hundred and sixty degrees seems to represent the idea of days passing. The forth line uses that term geometry in order to show that the bodies were so mangled that they no longer resembled people but rather that they resembled shapes. The scratched lens that he refers to in the sixth verse only provides more information into the narrator’s identity. It is as though he is using a camera to capture the essence of the carnage so the he may attempt to relook at the scene and understand what has happened.  The only time that the other strays away from his analytical thinking is the final verse when he states “maybe the tasteless cleanup of an unrelenting sun, maybe a wild animal tracking fresh scent into focus. Even though he is referring to his previous statement about solving equations he finally brings a natural feeling into the poem which allowed me to finally see the battlefield as a place of pain rather than the lines and angles that originally described the scene.

The Narrator is attempting to do the same thing that anybody who reads a war poem is trying to do, understand. He is trying to understand war and its complexities the best he can. But he is unable to look at the field with the emotion necessary to understand the pain felt by the bodies.  He turns soldiers into the variable “X”, a simple math term that can stand for anything. This takes away from the sacrifices that have been made by the soldiers that were in the battle and turns them into simple data. In a way it is almost as if he is dehumanizing war, making Civil War Photograph different from any other war poem I have ever read. Overall, even though the poem was lacking in the emotional department (which is usually a requirement in war poetry)  I thoroughly enjoyed being able to view war from a different perspective and not get caught up in the feelings that arise from other war poems.