1943 by Donald Hall

While looking through my poetry packet, I had completely forgotten about the poem 1943. I don't know why I forgot about it since it struck a pretty big chord on me when Shelby and Julia presented it in class. This poem is about war, but the way Mr. Donald Hall presents it is pretty intense.

To start off, he begins by comparing war to football back in highschool. He mentions how the boys from football thought they were geting practice for war while playing this strict sport:

They toughened us for war. In the high-school auditorium Ed Monahan knocked out Dominick Esposito in the first round

of the heavyweight finals, and ten months later Dom died in the third wave at Tarawa

These lines hit home pretty hard seeing as my brother was enrolled in the Army a few years back. It's cruel to make these high school boys believe that football is a form of teaching the ways of the Army because you and I both know that football doesn't even compare to war.
It's also horrible to think Dom, the boy in the poem who gets killed, didn't know what was coming when he went overseas to fight a brutal war. In the third stanza, Hall makes it clear that life back on the home front continues to go on as men overseas are dying everyday trying to protect its people.

Our class decided that the comparison of milk related to a nurturing feeling, which is felt on the home front. The comparison of milk to the frost bite of the soldiers is an uncomfortable transition for people thinking differently of the war. It makes the reader feel somewhat ashamed that all this is going on while people at home remain unaffected. It's an eerie and gloomy poem, but I really, really liked it.