Essay Questions

Explain the lined "Hath turned with malign kiss/Our lives to mould’’ in the poem "On Receiving News of the War’’.

As the title suggests, the poem focuses on the way in which war affected the lives of normal people. The war the narrator describes in the poem is the First World War, a conflict which affected the whole world and killed millions of people, both on the battle fields and simple civilians.

The quote from above is used as an allusion towards the war and having been inspired by the Biblical tale of Jesus just before he died. In the tale, one of Jesus’ apostles named Judas betrayed Jesus and sold him to the religious leaders of the time who wanted to see Jesus dead. Judas told the leaders he will point out to them who Jesus was by kissing him on the check. The kiss thus became in this context associated with a grave act of betrayal.

The whole society was betrayed as well during the First World War, the betrayal coming from the political leaders who were supposed to protect the nations. Instead of doing that, they started a war which affected the working class more than anyone else. In this sense, we can claim that the ruling class betrayed their subjects just as Jesus was betrayed by one of his closest friends.

Explain the last two lines in the poem "Through these Pale Cold Days’’.

The last two lines of the poem are "They see with living eyes/How long they have been dead.’’ These lines are used in this poem as a conclusion to what the poem analyzed until that point, namely the hopes many harbored inside their hearts when it came to the end of the war. The population hoped the war will be a quick one, with few casualties but instead, it lasted more than anyone had expected and it killed millions of people. Those who survived the war had no power to change the world for the better and in this sense, they were dead as well, forced to see the world crumbling just before their eyes. Those people can just stand and look at themselves and at the world around them as it slowly changed into something which no one thought would happen.

Why does the narrator mention wealth as being a curse given by God?

In the poem "God’’, the narrator claims wealth was given by God to men as a way to both allow they to be happy as well as to produce them pain. The first part presented wealth as something which can bring joy to a person, allowing them to live a happy and carefree life. This happiness is given to few people, making the gift appear even more precious. This gift has a dark side as well, hindering those who have access to it from being accepted by God and making them more reluctant to accept the reality of death. This idea may have been adopted from the Bible, where wealth is described as being both a protection and an obstacle when it comes to reaching the true happiness offered by God. There are even parables included in the Bible which have the purpose of showing the way in which wealth can influence the lives of the people and make them more eager to accept sin if they will have access to wealth though that.