Christian Parra Post #2
This post was difficult for me as I was not able to find a correlation between a poem and song. After some extensive research, I was finally able to decide on a song and poem. The poem I choose to relate to a song is Du Fu’s Spring Prospect. I choose this song because I felt it reminded me of Metallica’s “One”. “One” is an antiwar song derived by the events of World War I on a soldier. Very much like “Spring Prospect”, “One” describes the pain and struggles that occur during war.
The first verses I choose to compare, starting with “Spring Prospect” is
“Feeling the times, blossoms draw tears;
hating separation, birds alarm the heart.”
“a letter from home worth ten thousand in gold”
And in Metallica’s “One” I chose the following verse, this verse portrays similar emotions but at a much more drastic level,
“Darkness
Imprisoning Me
All That I See
Absolute Horror
I Cannot Live
I Cannot Die
Trapped in Myself
Body My Holding Cell”
These verses express mental traumatic stress experienced through their respective events. At this point the melody of the song becomes much more aggressive and rapid. Which I believe is a representation of anger, just like how Du Fu expresses in the second line.
The line in “Spring Prospect” that says
“White hairs, fewer for the scratching, soon too few to hold a hairpin up.”
Du Fu speaks on how the long war has altered his physicality and I felt Metallica’s “One” similarly portrays this, in a much more gruesome way, in the verse that says
“Landmine
Has Taken My Sight
Taken My Speech
Taken My Hearing
Taken My Arms
Taken My Legs
Taken My Soul
Left Me with Life in Hell.”
I felt both verses are great examples of how war changes people physically. Du Fu’s example regards how much he has aged, which is caused by the duration of his imprisonment during the war. And the other is a soldier that was permanently wounded during World War I.
In conclusion, I felt both compositions depicted the effects of War, one from the perspective of a prisoner of war, while the other is through the eyes of a severely injured soldier.
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