Permanence of War in Komunyakaa and Lauber's Poems
This paper examines the theme of permanence in two war poems: Yusef Komunyakaa's "Facing It" and Peg Lauber's "Six National Guardsmen Blown Up Together." Through close reading and comparative analysis, the paper explores how each poem conveys the indelible physical and emotional damage caused by war. It considers differences in narrative perspective — first-person in Komunyakaa's poem versus third-person and first-person plural in Lauber's — while identifying shared imagery, including birds and specific casualty numbers, that reinforces war's irreversible costs. The paper concludes that both poems ultimately argue society must be "undeceived" about the realities of war.
- Introduction: Nothing Will Ever Be the Same: Introduces both poems and the thesis of war's permanence
- Facing It: A Veteran's Emotional Ambivalence: Analyzes survivor's guilt and duality in Komunyakaa's poem
- Six National Guardsmen: The Universal Cost of War: Examines Lauber's third-person, collective voice on grief
- Shared Imagery and Language Across Both Poems: Compares bird imagery and tone across both poems
- The Indelible Physical and Emotional Damage of War: Explores how specific numbers make war's costs concrete
- Permanence, Memory, and the Impossibility of Erasure: Closing lines, failed erasure, and society's need for truth
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper sustains a single, clear thesis — that war's damage is permanent and indelible — and returns to it consistently throughout, giving the analysis coherent direction.
- Close textual quotation is used well: the student grounds each interpretive claim in specific lines from the poems, allowing the poetry itself to do argumentative work.
- The comparison is genuinely balanced; rather than privileging one poem, the paper moves fluidly between them, identifying both differences (narrative mode) and meaningful parallels (bird imagery, specific numbers).
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper models comparative thematic analysis: it identifies a unifying theme across two distinct texts, then uses point-by-point comparison — narration, imagery, diction, and closing lines — to show how each poem approaches that theme differently while arriving at the same conclusion. This structure prevents the essay from becoming a simple summary of each poem in turn.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by introducing both poems and stating its thesis. It then analyzes "Facing It" alone before pivoting to "Six National Guardsmen Blown Up Together," establishing the contrasting narrative voices. Two comparative sections follow — one on shared imagery and one on thematic significance of specific numbers — before a final section examines each poem's closing lines and the shared idea that history cannot be rewritten. A brief conclusion ties the argument to a broader humanistic point using a Melville quotation.
Introduction: Nothing Will Ever Be the Same
"Nothing, nothing will ever be the same" is the last line of Peg Lauber's poem "Six National Guardsmen Blown Up Together." And it is true: nothing is the same after war. The ravages of war and conflict are permanent and indelible. This is a theme explored in Lauber's poem as well as in Yusef Komunyakaa's "Facing It." The purpose of this paper is to explore the meaning and thematic significance of permanence in these two resonant war poems.
Facing It: A Veteran's Emotional Ambivalence
"Facing It" is a poem about Vietnam. The speaker is standing at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., looking into its black reflective gabbro walls: "My black face fades, / hiding inside the black granite" (Komunyakaa). He is confronting — facing — the unbearable cost of war. He realizes that he is at once both a part of the wall and separate from it: "I'm stone. I'm flesh. / My clouded reflection eyes me / like a bird of prey, the profile of night / slanted against morning. I turn / this way — the stone lets me go. / I turn that way — I'm inside / the Vietnam Veterans Memorial / again, depending on the light / to make a difference" (Komunyakaa).
This duality — being both inside and outside something, being both stone and flesh, both dead and alive — symbolizes the speaker's internal struggle to make sense of his position as a survivor of the Vietnam conflict. He is a veteran: "I go down the 58,022 names, / half-expecting to find / my own in letters like smoke" (Komunyakaa). He feels a tinge of survivor's guilt, knowing that but for happenstance — "depending on the light," a factor beyond his control — his own name could be etched in that black stone. His emotional ambivalence stems from profound sadness for those who died and a feeling of extreme fortune at not seeing his name among those ghostly letters.
Six National Guardsmen: The Universal Cost of War
If "Facing It" expresses the emotional ambivalence a veteran feels upon seeing the names of fallen compatriots memorialized in stone, then "Six National Guardsmen Blown Up Together" deals with what a non-veteran feels about the costs of war. The feelings are similar in that both poems articulate the incredible weight of loss vividly and succinctly. However, in "Six National Guardsmen Blown Up Together," the speaker does not grapple with the same internal conflict — the existential duality of being a veteran. Instead, the speaker adopts a more universally reflective voice, one that describes how others feel about the death of loved ones: the weeping wives and frightened children.
This difference stems from the contrasting modes of narration. "Facing It" largely employs first-person narration — "I touch the name Andrew Johnson; / I see the booby trap's white flash" — whereas "Six National Guardsmen Blown Up Together" uses third-person narration — "Today the six come home for good" (Lauber) — and first-person plural: "Right across the canal out front / is the Naval base's runway approach / where we'll hear or even see / the big cargo plane carrying / what is left of the men coming in." This shift to "we" expresses the collective response of society rather than the observations of a single veteran.
Works Cited
Lauber, Peg. "Six National Guardsmen Blown Up Together." New Orleans Suite. Wisconsin: Marsh River Editions, n.d. Web.
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Facing It." Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Print.
Melville, Herman. "Shiloh, A Requiem." 1862. Web.
Nabokov, Vladimir. "Good Readers and Good Writers." 1948. Web.
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