Primo Levi: Buna

Primo Levi: Buna

The poem Buna was authored by Primo Levis. Primo was an Italian Jewish poet who survived the Holocaust. This poet was born in the late 1910s and passed away in 1987. Primo authored several books, novels, and poems that are popular with contemporary readers. In his poem Buna, primo writes about how he survived the Holocaust. This poem has been presented in a self-reflection version of the transformation he experienced after his horrible time at Auschwitz. The poem seems to be a narration of what Levi Primo faced. Most of his audience would consider the events described in the poem horrifying acts committed by humankind and survived. From the contents of the poem, the persona is believed to have undergone and experienced an inner transformation. The poem reveals this by portraying images of horror events and the persona’s conversion from an excited young man to an exhausted soldier. The scientific form of poetry, as well as the writing style portrayed by the author, conveys a message that addresses rhetoric of his past life.

This poem relates to the larger picture of the Holocaust in many ways. Firstly, the persona describes his situation as broken, and nothing is left of courage. In the larger picture of the Holocaust, those who survived were left with broken souls with very little to celebrate. They were so poor that they no longer grieve. This shows that the Holocaust left people with little hope in them that they could not fight back for themselves.

This poem is effective in relating the Holocaust to the readers because the persona describes how the genocide left them hopeless. It gives vivid aftermaths of the genocide associated with the Holocaust. The audience would be able to identify the terrible events from how the persona described them.

Carl Sandburg: Grass

Carl Sandburg is an American poet, journalist, and author who was born in the late 1870s. This author of the poem Grass was a straighter thinker and writer who was not into other crazy forms of poetry like the dactylic hexameter.

In the poem Grass published just after the culmination of the Great War, the author takes the event head-on. Sandburg does not just talk about the Great War but writes about several other events while tackling a long history of wars in his work. While doing so, Sandburg connects all these wars and their events with the idea of forgetting the past and grass growing over the battlegrounds. Towards the end of his poem, he portrays the beginning of a new life by posing a concern regarding whether people heal from the scars of ordeals related to wars. He also wonders whether the new grass on the battlefields would wipe the memories of the casualties.

This poem relates to the larger picture of the Holocaust as a result of how the persona recounts the events and aftermaths of all the wars connected to the Great War. The persona seems to assert that after every war, there are casualties. No matter how lucky the casualties may have escaped, they still cannot wipe out the memories on the battlefield and the losses incurred.

This poem is not that effective in relating the Holocaust to the readers because it does not recount the events of the actual aftermaths of the Second World War genocide. Instead, it uses several wars to create a connection to the Holocaust.