Summary
Highlights
This video analyzes Beatrice Garland's poem 'Kamikaze.' Garland, born in 1938, worked in the NHS and won the National Poetry Prize in 2001. 'Kamikaze' is from her 2013 collection 'The Invention of Fireworks,' focusing on life and death. Garland is interested in what motivates individuals to sacrifice their lives for a cause. The poem deals with four generations: a mother talking to her children about her father (the kamikaze pilot) and his father. Kamikaze pilots in WWII Japan were sent on suicide missions, seen as a great honor.
Garland emphasizes that the poem's conflict is both personal and national. The national expectation was for the pilot to die honorably, while his inner conscience desired to return home. This tension between cultural expectation and personal desire is central, differentiating it from poems like 'Exposure' where thoughts of home motivate fighting. In 'Kamikaze,' thoughts of nature and home cause the pilot to turn back.
The poem's structure reflects this conflict; a tight six-line stanza structure represents military control, while free verse and enjambment signify the pilot's desire for freedom. The language heavily utilizes natural imagery, like a 'green blue translucent sea' and 'fishes flashing silver,' often employing sibilance for smooth, energetic descriptions. Garland states this beauty shows why the pilot shouldn't want to deprive himself and others of 'intense pleasure,' suggesting a realization about the value of life.
Like 'Ozymandias' or 'The Prelude,' 'Kamikaze' explores nature's power over human endeavors. The 'dark prince, muscular, dangerous' tuna fish is presented as the most powerful character, with its description culminating in the poem's first full stop. This highlights nature's true power and potentially leads the pilot to realize the futility of human ambition, causing him to turn back.
The poem contains ambiguity, as seen in the 'sunrise' image which is both natural beauty and a symbol of Japan's military. The repetition of 'safe' for the grandfather's boat hints at the pilot's desire for his own safe return to his children. The children's 'cairns of pearl-gray pebbles' symbolize death, and the 'arcing in sways like a huge flag' fish shows the pilot's initial brainwashed perspective, which diminishes as he decides to return.
The narrator initially uses the third person ('her father,' 'she'), indicating relational distance and potential shame. A shift to first-person direct speech ('my mother') in the penultimate verse reveals the speaker is the pilot's daughter, highlighting her own conflicted feelings. The tragic ending, 'He must have wondered which had been the better way to die,' suggests that his return led to an emotional death, making his choice to return home a 'kamikaze mission' in itself, as it ended his life as he knew it.