1943

1943 was an interesting poem. It was somewhat of a narrative poem because it told a story of a soldier going from the life he knew at home to war, specifically War World II. It mostly transitioned from one setting to the next, telling something about the soldier's lives before the war and then a detail about the war. In the first two couplets of the poem the theme was mostly about Dominick Esposito and in the last three couplets the theme was about milk.
The author created Dominick Esposito as an example of how Dominick's life transitioned from his normal life as a boxer to a solder in World War II. He especially described his life in the war with the line, "and ten months later Dom died in the third wave at Tarawa."
We considered milk another theme because it was frequently mentioned in the last three couplets.
As for the structure of the poem it was made up of entirely couplets and had no rhyme scheme. We considered the poem both an ode because it was written about a dignified subject and an elegy because it wt mourned the loss of the solder's previous lives before they went to war.
The last line of the poem, "with frostbitten feet as white as milk.", was the climax of the poem. It tied in the author's reference to a soldier's previous Mamore of getting milk delivered to his home in Connecticut. then in the winter how the milk froze and, "lifted the cardboard lids of glass bottles." The words before the last line, "-what could we do?-", builds up to the climax line because it is the soldier seeing the deaths of his fellow soldiers, how they got frostbitten feet, and thinking that he could do nothing but continue on with his tasks and think of better times from his life before the war.