Men in War Poems

AB Negative (The Surgeon’s Poem) Compared to D.C. Berry

Both of these poems tell us about masculinity in the war. The first poem called AB Negative, which tells the story about a women, which turns in to the efforts of the surgeons trying to save her, and her drifting off, starting to zone out. In the poem it says “Thalia fields is gone, long gone” which can let us imply that she died. Then it says that the surgeons was in tears, and needed help from a nurse to be sat down. This shows the more feminine side, with the male surgeon breaking down, and being escorted by a woman. Also the author illustrates the women’s feeling by the colors she is seeing when she is drifting in and out of consciousness.
In the D.C. Berry poem, it tells what it feels like to be shot in the lung in a Vietnam rice field. The poem is staggering in its writing to give the feeling like the soldier is distorted in pain. “You are lungshot in a race paddy and you are taking a drink of your own homeostatic globules each time you swallow a pail of air”. This poem is showing the graphite effects of the pain, while The Surgeons Poem is softer, with the woman drifting in and out of consciousness easily, with no pain.
This can all be compared to the Vietnam video, were the soldiers were trained in boot camp to ‘kill, kill, kill’ and to “pray for war”. These poems show both the masculine and feminine sides of the soldiers. That getting shot in the lung is painful, and it takes your mind off everything except your lung and the pain you are feeling. While in The Surgeons Poem the male figure broke down from the pressures of war, and the death surrounded by it. These poems show how the war brought out different sides of males and how it was nothing that they had predicted it to be.