16 pages • 32 minutes read
Dunya MikhailThe War Works Hard
Nonfiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Injury and Death
The most tragic effect of war in the poem is the way in which it literally and figuratively scars the human lives and bodies within the war-torn country: injury and death are therefore two powerful, complementary motifs throughout “The War Works Hard”. The poem’s first description of the war’s impact is the rush to retrieve the dead and wounded from scenes of recent bombardments every morning, as the war “wakes up the sirens / and dispatches ambulances / to various places” (Lines 5-7). The war “swings corpses through the air” (Line 8) through exploding bombs, and “rolls stretchers to the wounded” (Line 9) in the wake of the violence, physically scarring the bodies of its victims with wounds. The speaker even describes bodies being pulled from the wreckage of ruined buildings, some of which are already ‘lifeless”, and some of which are “pale” with pain and “still throbbing” with life (Lines 15-16). Likewise, the speaker alludes to amputees left permanently disfigured by war, and describes the bodies war leaves behind as “food for flies” (Line 36). The visceral yet matter-of-fact language that Mikhail weaves throughout these descriptions amplifies the violence and the emotional numbing of these events, emphasizing both the physical costs of war, and the less-visible emotional damage that war brings to its victims.
Destruction
War abruptly tears down, what humanity struggles to build up over many years, which the speaker reminds the reader repeatedly throughout “The War Works Hard”. On one hand, the war levels buildings that house innocent, ordinary people trying to live their lives: the speaker describes bodies being pulled out of the wreckage of bombardments, with some victims dead and others seriously injured (Lines 14-16). On the other hand, the war also impacts the natural world, turning fields that could provide nourishment through food sources into barren danger zones: “[the war] sows mines in the fields / and reaps punctures and blisters” (Lines 22-23). What should be a scene of the renewal of life and the rhythm of the seasons has instead become a wasteland.
In tearing things down, the war also builds and expands on others. The problem is that the things it builds up are always tragic and terrible reminders of the effect it has had upon the country. The speaker mentions the war “build[ing] new houses / for the orphans” (Lines 44-45) – orphanages – and creating an endless demand for products associated with death and burial, since it “invigorates the coffin makers” (Line 46). War also bolsters “the industry / of artificial limbs” (Lines 34-35) thanks to the mounting number of amputees. In this way, even the supposed stimulus that war provides is still destructive in nature, reminding the reader that everything the war brings is ultimately sterile: it destroys life and human development instead of nurturing it.
War
War is both the poem’s dominant motif and its most important symbol. In personifying war through her eulogy on its tireless efforts, the poem’s speaker turns the concept of “war” into a symbol for all the individual human beings who cause and perpetuate armed conflicts, with all the resultant crimes against their fellow human beings that they commit. As a motif, war ties the poem together through its presence in every single line of the poem: each line is either describing war’s qualities or accounting for its effects. In using war as both the poem’s protagonist and as its most important motif, the poem’s speaker recreates the sense of dreadful omnipresence the war has for all its human victims in settings of armed conflict.
