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Beautiful Wreckage W.D Ehrhart

Beautiful Wreckage W.D Ehrhart. Megan Anderson. W.D Ehrhart.

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Beautiful Wreckage W.D Ehrhart

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  1. Beautiful WreckageW.D Ehrhart Megan Anderson

  2. W.D Ehrhart Ehrhart was the third son of four. After high school W.D Ehrhart joined the US Marine Corps. He spent 13 months in Vietnam, this event influenced most of his writing. He began writing at the age of 15. His daughter and wife are major sources of inspiration for his poetry.

  3. Stanza 1 What if I didn’t shoot the old lady running away from our patrol, or the man in the back of the head, or the boy in the marketplace? The poem is a free verse meaning it has no intentional rhyme scheme and it is also a ballad so it tells a story.

  4. Stanza 2 Or what if the boy- but he didn’t have a grenade, and the woman in Hue didn’t lie in the rain in a mortar pit with seven Marines just for food, This poem is not a lyric poem but more of a ballad. Meaning it tells us a story. This story is about a soldier in Vietnam, he wants to help his country but thinks about things he could have done differently. This slide also starts the continuation of repetition of “the lady, the man, the boy”.

  5. Stanza 3 Gaffney didn’t get hit in the knee, Ames didn’t die in the River, Ski didn’t die in a medevac chopper between Con Thien and Da Nang The people highlighted in this poem are very important to the speaker in the poem. He knows their dead but wishes they weren’t. He wonders how everything would have turned out if they were back and alive.

  6. Stanza 4 In Vietnamese, Con Thien means place of angels. What if it really was instead of the place of rotting sandbags, incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud The highlighted words are describing what Vietnam was really like during the war. There is allusion in this stanza when he talks about how “Con Thien means place of angels”.

  7. Stanza 5 What if the angels were Ames and Ski, or the lady, the man, and the boy, and they lifted Gaffney out of the mud and healed his shattered knee? In this poem there are 6 stanzas, 4 lines each, and al together 24 lines. Within the lines most of what is said is about death and destruction, until stanza 5. Then the speaker talks about “what if” and things he wish he could change.

  8. Stanza 6 What if none of it happened the way I said? Would it be a lie? Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful? Would the dead rise up and walk? This last stanza is where the figurative meaning comes out. So far we have had many literal meanings. Like the speaker describing what Vietnam was like during the war, or the way they killed certain people. But the figurative meaning you may not get until right now. The figurative meaning is about facing ourselves. Basically facing the consequences of our everyday actions.

  9. The Purpose The authors purpose for this poem was to tell us what the war was like. The intentional theme is fantasy verses reality.

  10. http://www.wdehrhart.com/biography.html • www.howstuffworks.com • nypost.com • incogman.net

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