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Irony
Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Metaphors
Explanation and Analysis—Merciless Sea:
When Helen finally makes it to the cemetery, the dead figuratively return to life through a blend of metaphor and personification. Kipling metaphorically compares the cemetery to both a sea and a field of weeds. In addition, he personifies the thousands of crosses by writing that they possess faces and by describing their motion towards her.
She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her.
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Explanation and Analysis—Assembly Line:
In the the story's second half, Kipling uses diction associated with manufacturing to describe the war and its sorrow. Through the metaphor underlying this motif, he compares the war to an industrial assembly line. On one conveyor belt, young men with their futures ahead of them are sent to their deaths. On another conveyor belt, their loved ones are sent into mourning. The mass scale of the war and immense number of its victims depersonalize loss and grief, making people like Helen feel as though their emotions are part of a cold, mechanized process without room for individual experiences.
The narrator touches on this several times, but elaborates most on it after the war is over and Helen finally receives an official letter stating that Michael's body has been found.
Unlock with LitCharts A+So Helen found herself moved on to another process of the manufacture – to a world full of exultant or broken relatives, now strong in the certainty that there was an altar upon earth where they might lay their love. These soon told her, and by means of time-tables made clear, how easy it was and how little it interfered with life’s affairs to go and see one’s grave.
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