📖 Key Terms

📖 Key Terms

Dramatic irony (structural)

The reader knows something the subject does not. Ozymandias's boast is ironic in Shelley; in War Photographer, the irony is that images of suffering designed to move people are already forgotten by the poem's final stanza. Duffy makes the reader aware of their own position within this irony.

Simile

A direct comparison using "like" or "as". "Like a priest preparing to intone a Mass" is the poem's central simile: it frames photography as a moral and spiritual act, not a commercial one.

Allusion

A reference to another text, event, or idea. "All flesh is grass" alludes to Ecclesiastes (a book of the Bible about the passing of all earthly things), deepening the poem's argument about impermanence and forgetting.

Caesura

A strong pause within a line of poetry, usually marked by punctuation. Duffy uses caesura to interrupt the poem's regular rhythm at moments of emotional weight — the pause enacts the psychological interruption of a traumatic memory surfacing.

Enjambment

When a sentence or phrase runs over from one line to the next without pause. Duffy uses enjambment at key moments — "eyeballs prick / with tears" — to break the emotional response before it completes, mirroring the reader's incomplete engagement with suffering.

Semantic field

A cluster of words drawn from the same area of meaning. Duffy builds a semantic field of religion (priest, Mass, intone, All flesh is grass) to frame war photography as a form of sacred witness — then shows that witness to be useless against structural indifference.