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COME ON, COME BACK ANALYSIS
Hello, welcome to another tutorial video. This time we’re going to look at ‘Come
On, Come Back’, really sarcastic poem. It’s got this kind of light tone to this horrible,
horrible, bleak thing that’s happening. There’s a great amount of ridicule in this
and we’re going to go into it, especially actually when I get to this point here in
images, I think this is brilliant and one of the best poems for actually summing up
this whole thing.
So we start off with structure, as ever and we’ve got this interesting side note to
actually be taken here. It’s an incident in a future war, so what’s that telling
us is to imagine this first of all, but second of all it’s linking it to every other war
that could possibly have happened and ridiculing all of the elements that will actually bring
us to this situation.
Second then we’ve got the long sentences. We’ve got – you can see them just because
of the punctuation – just even here we’ve got this whole stanza with only one comma,
so that whole stanza there is a sentence and that allows us to get in a load of ideas but
moreover, it actually reflects the lack of structure that this soldier has within themselves,
because they have no memory, so they have no identify of themselves, so they don’t
know who they are or what they do and that’s emphasised further when ‘Her fingers tap
the ground’, she just sits tapping the ground, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. We
don’t get a purpose, that’s not – tapping of the ground in and of itself isn’t necessarily
something that we’d expect a soldier to be doing in terms of a command or trying to
tap out a code. It could be that she’s just passing the time waiting, but the feel that
we get and the pace that she gets from the rest of the poem doesn’t seem like that,
this person is sad, she isn’t just tapping her hand on the ground just waiting for someone,
she’s lost herself, we can just imagine her being utterly fearful and she has no idea
who she is because of the ML5 that’s attacked her.
The enjambment used all the way through is really interesting because it allows us to
hang on so many words and focus on so many words. We’ll take this one for example,
‘has left her just alive’ and we’ll hold on that phrase of ‘just alive’, which
I’ll come to in more detail later, but it’s very powerful and it just reminds us that
that’s all she us, just this collection of chemistry really and biology, just kind
of kicking off neurons and firing, reacting across, but she has no idea in a sense of
who she is. The biological parts of it are just happening but there’s no person in
there. It’s utterly, utterly dehumanising and utterly, utterly sad to think of someone
in that situation. And again here we have example of the enjambment, ‘her mind is
as secret from her as the water…’ and just imagine there’s that phrase ‘on which
she swims’, which is that phrase earlier – ‘her mind is as secret from her…’
and just the idea of being so distanced from yourself, like a lot of us have the idea sometimes
of frustration, of not knowing exactly what we want to do or why we do certain things,
but having no idea at all, like literally no idea, how damning must that be and how
damning must it feel?
The punctuation in the structure of all this is really, really important as well because
it allows us to get different tones and voices coming through and different paces. So here
we have the ‘dash’ is used to kind of break us off into this really quick list of
helplessness – ‘a child’, no ‘an idiot’, no ‘one without memory’, so it gets worse
as that builds. The punctuation here as well where we have the quotation marks of the title
of the song and the brackets just kind of adding it as a little aside. ‘An enemy sentinel
Finding the abandoned clothes Waits for the swimmer’s return (‘Come on, come back’)
Waiting, whiling…’ and it just gives a little kind of sideway, like a different feel,
again a different element of what feels like ridicule all the way through this, making
fun of it. We’ve also got the question mark here, ‘she fears’, ‘Ah me, why am I
here?’ So although that changes from the third person to the first person, the question
mark allows us to do that seamlessly because in the question we can pick that up as a different
voice.
So if you look at what little punctuation is used, it’s actually used to create effect,
to really create different tones and voices, which is important because when we’re looking
at the effects of war, there’s so many different voices that are heard and moments that are
captured and so this allows us to do that in some way.
Moving on then to meaning. We’ve got the effects of war and how this person is completely
dehumanised, utterly broken, and we’ve got that from obviously the use of ML5, which
is interesting just in the way it’s written, because it’s kind of like some kind of derivative,
the kind of things that we refer to weapons or weaponry or biological weapons there, such
as an AK47, there’s this kind of combination of letters and truncated numbers together
to actually give us this sense of something. So ML5 is used or like Zyklon B for example,
another chemical name. I’d be interested to find out what Stevie Smith was actually
intending by the ML there. Memory loss 5 or something, perhaps it could be but that’s
just a guess, I’m not saying use that in the exam, I don’t know what it actually
stands for.
So yes, the dehumanising effects on this, she doesn’t understand who she is, she says
she lost her memory, she doesn’t understand why she’s actually in the place, etc. She’s
like an idiot, she strips off her uniform and that’s the last bit of identity she
has, so it is really dehumanising, both in the fact that she has suffered from the war
in this way and also in the fact that perhaps being in the army in itself was in some way
dehumanising.
One of the other messages that comes through is that she suffers the same lies and the
same propaganda, and that’s really emphasised in the title, Come On, Come Back’ and that’s
what always makes me laugh because it’s such a ridiculous phrase, but used to such
great effect to actually emphasise the absurdity of this. We all hear the same kind of talk
‘your country needs you’, so many clichés that you can think of with regards to time
in the army, and that’s the kind of thing that gets people kind of encouraged and following
orders and doing what they’re supposed to do, etc., but everywhere hears the same thing.
So she’s heard it here and here her enemy’s actually playing the same thing again and
it’s a favourite of all the troops, of all the armies, so it’s the same idea being
pushed, the same propaganda, whatever it is to actually get people into war. We need to
beat the enemy, they’re planning to attack us, they’re planning to do this, whatever
the propaganda is, it’s summed up by ‘Come On, Come Back’. The phrase in itself seems
so simple, but you add words either side of it and it means so much more. So ‘come on
join us’, ‘come back victorious’ or ‘come on let’s kill them’, ‘come back
winners’, stuff like this, it does sum up so much of the emphasis of what you could
say, some of the thrust of propaganda or hat army commands were.
We move on then to the idea of death, obviously the death of her but obviously at the beginning
here we have the death, we presume of other people who’d actually lost their lives in
Austerlitz up at the beginning. So you can pick up quite a lot there. And the relentlessness
of it is emphasised first of all by the tide of the battle, ‘the ebbing tide of the battle’,
the battle turned, they’ve lost it, but moreover just in her being reduced to wanting
to die here, killing herself, jumping into the water to kill herself.
We have then the images that are presented to us. The first one that comes to us is – the
major image that I can say for this is absurdity – there’s so many absurd things that you
could just pick up but it’s so subjective, like you could read it in a completely different
way and just say ‘this was starkly serious’. So I don’t want to go into that too much
but if you can see where this is absurd and you want to talk about it, then I would recommend
you do so. But classical images or things that are much more universal – the darkness
that comes across. So she goes in at midnight when she goes into the water or when she’s
actually found – so it’s actually midnight when she’s actually in this situation. She
goes into the dark lake, the waters close above her. We’ve also got the ‘blackness
of her mind’. So all those images of darkness and nothingness are kind of indicative of
the state of her memory and indicative of her not knowing who she is and being bleak
and dehumanised.
We’ve got this image of everything being against her as well. So right from the beginning
where she’s lost the war to the point here where she’s tapping her fingers and maybe
doesn’t actually know why she’s doing it; to the fact that her own memory won’t
allow her to think of anything; to the fact that her body isn’t responding the way it
should, as she’s staggering, as she moves along; to the fact that she wants to kill
herself in here; to the fact that even as she swims, she’s got this light that comes
down on her, the kind of the white of the moonlight actually comes back ‘Up the river
of white moonlight she swims’, and the moonlight we imagine being a full moon, a full bright
moon and that again, makes her out to be a little bit crazy because we get the idea of
the moon, the lunar, lunacy and her who’s obviously she’s gone killing herself and
she doesn’t know who she is, so everything’s against her. And then we’ve got her own
song, her favourite one is actually being sung by someone who’s waiting there to kill
her, etc., etc., so everything in this poem is against her. So you get that image of just
I suppose being a soldier in some ways, you can be damned if you do and damned if you
don’t – not only in terms of how people respond to you, but just in terms of you might
kill to win but at the same time when you kill someone you kill part of yourself. So
that blackness or that darkness really comes against her.
The last image we have, or the last image I’ve picked out here is Vaudevue dead and
she’s actually being ‘cradled by the water in the swift close embrace she sleeps on,
stirs not, hears not the familiar tune’, so there is just, this is where she’s peaceful
because we’ve got the word of the ‘embrace’ and she sleeps, you know, rather than it being
a horrific death etc., she’s just held, she’s sleeping, so she’s rested there.
The language then. There’s lots and lots to pick up here but one of the ones I want
to talk about, I think I mentioned earlier, the ‘just alive’, there’s just the bare
necessity of that here, the ‘just alive’ I think is really powerful because it refers
very well to the dehumanisation, you know, forget all the things that make you great,
all the compassion, all the love, etc., you’re just reduced to this thing that is just alive.
We’ve got the simile, this simile here ‘as a child’ and I think that’s really important
and then we’re supposed to infer these as an ‘idiot’ and as ‘one without memory’.
So all this list of similes here in quick succession, really strikes the degradation
that she’s gone through, or really strikes home the loss that she’s gone through and
moreover, it just offers us a vivid image to actually build in our minds and it’s
not often that you see simile used in such quick succession, so that’s a very novel
and striking way of using the similes.
And then lastly in the language, I’ve just picked out that we’ve got the naming of
Vaudevue. We’ve just got this soldier, a real soldier, with a first name and it’s
kind of like we know here quite well but also she’s got like a futuristic name in this
futuristic time and he emphasises to us - again in my own view - how absurd this is because
her name is quite bizarre. But it allows us to be personal with her, we feel like we know
her, we know her plight, we know what she says but we don’t know her thoughts because
she doesn’t know her thoughts, but we can piece together how she’s feeling in that
moment, so we can really empathise with her and feel a great deal of pathos for her situation.
So what effects does this have on us? Well ultimately it’s a very personal story, a
very personal moment which we can relate to a load of soldiers, especially the suicide
rate for people who’ve finished serving in wars is actually higher than the average,
so it makes us think about what personal journeys and experience people go through. It makes
us think about how the war changes people and a lot of intense situations do that – prison
is actually one that comes into my mind as well – but here we’re focusing on war
and we can just think about the dehumanising process and how can anyone feel the same after
killing someone else? Who knows?
The suicide as well is brought up, the idea of what people will do to try and get away
from certain problems and issues. So all these kind of things are just kind of brought up
and remember with the effect on the reader – every time I explain something, that’s
the effect why it was done – the effect on the reader is just to show that you’re
relating to it in a way, just to show that you’re understanding it, it’s got you
thinking about something, because generally the Examiners like that, just to show your
own personal thoughts on something and how it’s linked or how you’ve been inspired
in some way to think about something from a poem that you’ve studied.