War Photographer

War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy shows a photographer back home in England, developing his pictures of war in his darkroom. He knows that the readers who see them in a Sunday newspaper will feel sad for a moment, then forget.

Duffy, who later became Poet Laureate, was friends with war photographers. The poem was published in 1985.

The poem begins in the photographer's darkroom, where his rolls of film are laid out: ‘spools of suffering set out in ordered rows’. The sibilance sounds hushed, and ‘ordered rows’ suggests graves in a war cemetery.

The darkroom's red light makes it feel like a church, with the photographer like a priest. He lists the places he has worked: ‘Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.’ The last sentence comes from the Bible: all human life is short.

As a picture develops, he remembers the scene: his photographs hold ‘a hundred agonies in black and white’.

The poem has four stanzas of six lines, with a regular rhyme scheme. This ordered form mirrors the photographer's attempt to bring order to the chaos of war, laying out his photographs in neat rows.

But the order hides strong feelings. His hands were steady in the war zone; at home, developing the pictures, they seem to shake.

The poem contrasts the war zones with ‘Rural England’, where people suffer only ‘ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel’.

Themes: the effects of conflict; memory; how people at home ignore suffering. The readers' eyes fill ‘with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers’, a quick, easy sadness that is soon gone.

Compares well with:

• Remains: memories of war that can't be forgotten.
• Poppies: suffering, and people at home far from the fighting.
• Kamikaze: how others react to a person returning from war.