A Separate Peace Poem Analysis

A soldier’s suffering holds no refrain from anyone, no matter what title or identity they have. In both the worlds of soldiers in those in the poem entitled “losses” by Randall Jarrell and at Devon school in “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles, there are several relationships that they share. Both center around the lives of soldiers and soon to be soldiers during the cruel time of the second World War which was happening in Europe. Jarrell experiments with multiple identity in the combination of several speakers united in one, all wasted even before they could be conceded into the real experience of war. In the book World War II symbolizes many themes related to each other in the novel, from the arrival of adulthood to the triumph of the Evil
The trauma of what happened to Finny had taken a toll on him and made him feel he was dead. “I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.”(Knowles 194). The following eight lines focus on how insignificant a soldier’s death is in relation to a war being won or lost. The last two lines of the first stanza center around how the war for the young men was fought in school rather than on the actual battlefield. “(When we left high school nothing else had died, For us to figure we had died like.)”. The same could be said for Gene and Finny and how they died before their actual battle started because of the heartbreaking events that took place before they could even put on a uniform. This relationship is demonstrated in the book when Gene says “because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there”(Knowles
As the human spirit becomes an immoral killing machine, it loses its innocence and acquires a guilty conscience. This can be related in the book when Gene says "They seemed to be having a wonderful time, their uniforms looked new and good; they were clean and energetic; they were going places"(Knowles 97). This ironic description of soldiers going off to war contradicts the danger they would soon face. No matter how much students at Devon attempted to keep the outside world from invading, they could not. In the poem’s third paragraph the author writes “It was not an accident but a mistake(But an easy one for anyone to make.)”. This can easily be related the the book when Phineas dies due to a simple mistake by Dr. Stanpole which caused the bone marrow to reach his heart and stopping it, instantly killing him. Dr. Stanpole even talks about this relationship when he says “It was such a simple, clean break. Anyone could have set it”(Knowles