Refugee Camp Poem

What do you find interesting about the presentation of love and loss in the six poems we have studied?

In ‘A Mother in a Refugee Camp’ Chinua Achebe uses a single stanza poem to depict a story of love and emotion whilst ‘My Last Duchess’ uses a 56-line poem, in one single stanza as a dramatic monologue telling a story of a Duke and his last Duchess. ‘Remember’ also written in one single stanza, portrays death showing how remembering the late may not be the best idea. All three of these poems are different however, they can be connected through other poems that will also be discussed.

Achebe was a Nigerian poet and will have seen or even lived through a similar story as ‘A Mother in a Refugee Camp’. His knowledge of this kind of loss and affection along with a possible personal experience could be the reason his work as a poet

At the beginning of ‘A Mother in a Refugee Camp’ Achebe portrays an image of a mother’s pride and love for her child; ‘Her tenderness for a son’ but then contrasts this with ‘She soon will have to forget.’ The image of affection the reader feels that the mother has for her child is twisted. When the writer says ‘have to’ shows that she doesn’t want to give up. The poem is continued on to say ‘other mothers there had long ceased to care’ gives the impression that the other mothers don’t care which makes the mother seem even more heroic and her story more tragic. Her ‘ghost smile’ hides her sadness while she’s forced to not think about her child dying. These two words counteract as an oxymoron by the use of a negative word and a positive word. Breakfast and school are a normality to most people and part of someone’s daily life, however in the poem ‘breakfast and school’ are compared to ‘putting flowers on a tiny grave’ showing that this is the normality of the mother’s life now, and ‘breakfast and school’ is a distant memory of something she once had. Chinua Achebe uses sibilance frequently in