Breakfast- Wilfred Gibson

Form:         

Language:
-Depicts the resilience of soldiers under abnormal conditions- ‘we ate our breakfast lying on our backs’- they have made a slight change but are continuing as normal.
-Three actions happen in one sentence: ‘Ginger raised his head/ And cursed, and took the bet, and dropt back dead.’ This perhaps demonstrates the immediacy of death and highlights how quite how sudden and unexpected a soldier’s death could be.

Structure:
-Iambic pentameter is used to give a conversational and narrative mood to the poem which tells of the thin line between life and death.
-The repetition of ‘We ate our breakfast lying on our backs’ gives the poem a ‘complete’ structure. Perhaps this is the poet showing that for this dead soldier the journey is complete.
-This repetition could also represent how following a death soldiers merely carried on without mourning, maybe because they had become accustomed to death.

Tone :
Tone has a faintly comical edge helped by the use of the onomatopoeic word ‘screeching’ which may highlight the fact that death was just something that happened in the poets eyes and that soldiers did not mourn they just accepted it.

Reader responses:
-May be interpreted as the poet highlighting the inevitability of death and the thin line between it and life.
-However could also be seen in a positive light as, at times, the poet appears to depict the perseverance of soldiers and their resilience in the face of adversity (adverse conditions ect.).

Links:
The Rear-Guard by Sassoon. Within this poem Sassoon suggest that those on the front did not care about the dead: ‘Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap.’