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War poetry
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“ A war is going on, but the reason is undercover where’s the truth?” Black Eyed Peas 03 I feel this lyric from the song “ Where is the love” by the Black Eyed Peas is appropriate to begin my essay on war poetry as, in today’s war against Iraq nobody really knows why American went into Iraq. Was it not stop the evil that was there all ready? Or was it for something more important that Sadam, Oil. Because in approximately 30 years time there will be no oil left in the entire world and when it becomes extremely rare in a few years time who is going to be in charge of the world’s biggest oil supply in the world, America. Recently in my history course we have been studding Vietnam which has brought to live for me the realities of war. We saw numerous videos of America dropping nayplam bombs and then we saw the videos of journalists on the ground. Nayplam was originally used to fight the Vietcon as they hid in the forest and the Americans didn’t know where they where, so the Americans idea was to get rid of the trees and foliage they were hiding in by burning it via Nayplam. But Nayplam didn’t just burn the trees away, it buried human flesh away too. One of the videos showed this little girl running away from the bombing crying then as she ran past the camera we saw her back, which all the skin on one side had been burnt off. This really annoyed me. As the Americans had no right in Vietnam but they felt they had and so they felt they had to right to bombard the country. My feelings towards war have changed over time through maturity and mostly getting to see what war was really like. When I was young I thought that war just a simple matter of getting your gun shooting someone and then when you are bored, go home to your cosy warm house. You live in the war, and that war might go on for weeks, months or even years. But you have to stay for every last dreadful bit of it. You will not have a cosy warm home to live in for that time either or a meal every night. In war it’s a whole new life and a terrible one at that. You will have to live in trenches. Which will smell of your dead comrades lying beside you motionless. At night when you are trying to get to sleep you’ll feel the sharp nails of the rats running across you. You will not able to shower for weeks on end. Your meal if you are lucky to get one, might consist of just one small portion of meat. And if your lucky enough to get home in one peace you might come home to find that your younger brother died in the war which happened to poet, Siegfried Sassoon. Today I am against war. I feel it’s unnecessary, brutal and it destroys innocent lives and families. But war is inevitable. There is a flaw in human nature to fight with one another. We find it very hard to talk face to face with the person we hate the most, so it results in a war. War is also very costly as well. The Americans spend more on their Defence forces alone than all the armies in the world put together. It cost the Americans over $120 billion U.S dollars to finance the war in Vietnam. But the most costly thing in any war is human lives. America may spend the most money in the world on their defence forces but that doesn’t guarantee no loss in human life. Its amazing the loss in life in wars. But when one person’s life may be lost the other life may have been phyocologicaly damaged for life. In shell shock there is one instance, which I find chilling. One man had, had to kill another man face to face though he didn’t want to deep in his heart he had to save his own life. This is resulted in total disruption of his mind. Now every second of every day he has to re-live his killing in font of his own eyes. He ended up in a mental intitistion for the rest of his life. That was just one example out millions. There are veterans all over the world today that are living in metal intistions due to war. Men are disturbed the rest of their lives. Having nightmares every night, having to re-live that one moment in your life you wish to forget over and over and over again. Not being able to look at certain items that remind you of things you want to forget. Throughout this eassy I’ll be analysing, comparing and contrasting four war poems. They will be, “The solider” by Rupert Brooke, “The charge of the light brigade” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Counter attack” by Sregfried Sassoon and “Anthem for doomed youth” by Wilfred Owen Firstly I will be looking at, “The solider” by Rupert Brooke. This was one of the earliest examples of great war writing that is, in essence a dialogue between the living and the dead or in Rupert Brooke’s case the soon to be dead. Rupert Brooke was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, where his father taught classics and was a headmaster at Rugby School. In his childhood Brooke immersed himself in English poetry and twice won the school poetry prize. In 1906 he went to King's college, Cambridge. In 1910 Brooke's father died suddenly, and Brooke was for a short time in Rugby a deputy headmaster. Thereafter Brooke lived on an allowance from his mother In England he was a leader of a group of young 'Neo-pagans', who slept outdoors, embraced a religion of nature, and swam naked. The outbreak of World War I. interrupted Brooke's career as a writer. He was commissioned in Churchill's Royal Navy Division, and joined the Dardanelles expedition. Brooke did not see any action. He died of septicaemia as a result of a mosquito bite - or according to some sources of food poisoning - on a hospital ship off Scyros on April 23, 1915. Brooke was buried on the island. Henry James mourned Brooke's early death and the poet's legend was further solidified when Winston Churchill produced his own contribution to it with an obituary text. Around this time Poets would have always glorified war, and Brooke did his best to continue the tradition, and sacrifice himself in this effort. His death made him the hero of the first phase of the war and a canonised symbol of all the gifted young people destroyed by the conflict. However, Brooke's poetry with its patriotic mood and naive enthusiasm went out of fashion, as the realities of warfare were fully understood. His poem “The soldier” is about a man who loves his country dearly. This is country is England. He believes that if he should die in foreign field a far away battlefield that people should remember of him only that he was English. Brooke says in the fourth line, “In that rich earth a richer dust concealed” Which means that if he were to die in a land other than England that the soil would be made better because there would now be a peace of England within it. The plot of this poem reinforces the meaning because it deals with love and death. Both are powerful things that evoke feelings in people. It helps us create an image of a man who is very brave and would do anything for his country. He truly believes in his country. He describes England as, “And think this heart, all evil shed away” These are the words of a man he truly believes his land is the greatest in the world. Images in the poem are extremely strong and persuading. One image is the line. “Gave once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam” This line evokes the image of a beautiful woman cherishing the man who stands at her side, who will soon be leaving for war. Another line is, “Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home” This line creates a feeling of tranquillity. Another line that evokes a feeling of peace and happiness is, “Her sights sounds; dreams happy as her day” Images such as these force the reader to see the land in the same light as the poet. Symbolism also plays a big part in this poem. Some of the uses of symbolism are apparent in the line “And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness” Obviously we realise that the land dose not laugh and is not gentle. This is symbolism used to tell us how wonderful a place England is to live. More symbolism is used in the first stanza where it says, “If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. There shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed” As I mentioned earlier, Brooke believes that his dust will somehow enrich the land because it will now have a peace of England in it. The poet loves his country to the point of extreme and uses emotion symbols to make his point. Since Rupert Brooke had seen no action in the war so I don’t know why he is writing about war and dying. Before this poem was written the world had never seen a terrible war where millions died. They had only seen minor battles. But compared to “Dulce et Decorum est” you would think that the “The soldier” was talking about a civilian. In Rupert Brooke’s poem there is no mention on how he might die, or how he saw anyone else died, no mention of the horrid conditions, the little food they had to eat or the trenches. This poem is an excellent example of, “The old lie, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” The image created by Rupert Brooke is of one that is terrible far from war. There is more mention of his beloved England than anything else. There is no panic or any sense of being frightened in his poem, which is unusual since this is a war poem. My next poem is “ The charge of the light brigade” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. He was asked to write this poem to commemorate the heroism in the Crimean war. In his poem “Charge of the Light Brigade” Alfred Tennyson describes the valiant charge of the light brigade into the “jaws of death.” He makes use of repetition, allusion, and personification to paint a vivid picture of the charge, and, at the same time, he gives the reader a glimpse into the psyche of the valiant soldiers. Alfred Tennyson most commonly uses repetition in this poem, but he also makes use of allusion and personification. In the first stanza he repeats the phrase “half a league” three times in order to convey the tempo of the charge. In the fist stanza he also begins the repetition of “rode the six hundred,” a phrase which emphasises the small number of valiant soldiers riding against the “mouth of hell” itself. Alfred Tennyson also includes the first reference to the “Valley of Death” In the first stanza. This reference is continued throughout the poem. It functions as an allusion to the “valley of the shadow of death” in the twenty-third Psalm of the Bible and describes the charge. The allusion to the twenty-third Psalm serves to instil in the reader the sense of fearlessness that the brigade has because the psalm speaks of how evil in not to be feared, not even in the shadow of death itself. The reference to the valley also paints in the reader’s mind an image of being enclosed by greater things on all sides, a feeling no doubt shared by the soldiers. “Canon to the right of them, Cannon to the left of them, Cannon in front of them” That is another repeated phrase in the poem that is found in the third and fifth stanzas of the poem. The repetition of the phrase serves to add to the claustrophobic feeling in the reader that began with the mention of the charge into the valley. It also reminds the reader that the cannon of the enemy are all that can be seen no matter where the valiant soldiers look. Death also becomes personified in the third stanza when Alfred Tennyson gives it jaws. The personification of death is meant to shift the poem’s tone to a more carnal tone. The brigade is now pitted against the ultimate beast that threatens devour them. They must now kill or be killed. The “jaws of death” and “mouth of hell” are also repeated images in the poem. They paint a picture of soldiers starring into a black abyss that is about to consume them. In his poem Alfred Tennyson also provides the reader with some insight into the psyche of the men of the brigade. The first glimpse of the soldiers’ state of mind given in the poem comes in the form of the valley of death. The reader is told that the soldiers face certain death, but the phrase, through its biblical allusion, demonstrates to the reader that the evil is face without fear. Alfred Tennyson also gives a more direct insight into the psyche of the brigade when he writes that the soldiers knew, “Some one had blundered,” and that they knew their place was not to question orders but, “To do and die.” The reader then knows that these men are blindly motivated by loyalty and a sense of duty. “Cannon to the right of them, Cannon to the left of them, Cannon in front of them” This is another description Alfred Tennyson uses to take the reader in to minds of soldiers. This description allows the reader to see the battle as the soldier saw it. No matter where you looked, all that could be seen was certain death. No safety could be found. After being taken into the psyche of the brigade and seeing a vivid picture of the valiant charge the reader cannot hope to do anything but admire the valour of the soldiers and “Honour the Light Brigade.” Alfred Tennyson’s use of literary devices to paint a mental picture of a heroic charge and the insight he gives the reader into the minds of the valiant men who made it make his “Charge of the Light Brigade” a powerful poem. I really enjoy reading this poem. Because unlike “The soldier” this poem dose give you a sense of war. It gives you a sense of fear, a sense of anxiety and a sense of death, which are all related to the feelings you experience in war. Even though Alfred Tennyson praises the soldiers he dose it in such a way that he is not over doing it as I feel Rupert Brooke did in “The soldier”. Also this poem gives more detail in describing the enemy, as in “The soldier” there is no mention of the enemy and how they will kill him. On the other hand the detail in “The charge of the light brigade” about death is minute. It dose not tell you in any sort of great detail of the grusm death they experanced but still you can picture they way they have died because of the excellent detail he gave us on the horses and the Russian weapons. My next poem is “Counter attack” by Sregfried Sassoon. Siegfried Sassoon was born on 8th September 1886 at Weirleigh, near Paddock Wood in Kent. After Marlborough College he went to Clare College, Cambridge, but left without a degree. For the next eight years lived the life of a country gentleman. He spent his tie hunting, playing sports and writing poetry. Published privately, Sassoon's poetry made very little impact on the critics or the book buying public. On the outbreak of the First World War Sassoon enlisted as a cavalry trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry. In May 1915 Sassoon became an officer in the Royal Fusiliers, and was posted to the Western Front in France. Considered to be recklessly brave, he soon obtained the nickname 'Mad Jack'. In June 1916 he was awarded the Military Cross for bringing a wounded man back to the British lines while under heavy fire. While in France he met the poets Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen. After being wounded in April 1917, Sassoon was sent back to England. Sassoon had grown increasingly angry with the tactics being employed by the British Army and in July 1917 published a Soldier's Declaration. Which announced that, "I am making this statement as an act of will full defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." Sassoon's hostility to war was also reflected in his poetry. During the war Sassoon developed a harshly satirical style that he used to attack the incompetence and inhumanity of senior military officers. These poems caused great controversy when they were published in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918). Despite his public attacks on the way the war was being managed, Sassoon, like Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, agreed to continue to fight but not for his country, for the other men who were going through hell with him. Sassoon was sent to Palestine and France before further injuries forced him to return to England. “Counter Attack” is a poem about an infantry in the trenches which had just completed their first objective and they were waiting for the next. Then when dawn broke they got ready for the Germans (Allemands) to attack them. Then they were told to counter attack the Germans. But when they got out of the trenches the Germans were coming towards them and Siegfried Sassoon tells us in grim detail of how one soldier died as an on looker. Siegfried Sassoon mostly uses Metaphors, alliteration and Onamatipea in this poem. Already just by reading that you can all most all ready see the detail in this poem. This is the most detailed poem out of the four I will be looking at. On the second line in the first stanza it says, “While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes, Pallid, unshaved and thirst, blind with smoke.” This whole line helps us to imagine in what a terrible state the soldiers were in. Then the sun just sparkling into life in font of them nearly blinds them. They way he describes the soldiers makes them look like in our minds are like old tramps. Which is they way Wilfred Owen describes the soldiers in “Dulce Et Decorum Est”. Then the first onematpea word in the poem, “And the clink of the shovels, deepning the shallow trench” Clink, we can all most hear the soldiers hit a stone as they deepen the trench. Then the first real description of dead bodies we have seen, “The place was rotten with dead, green clumsy legs high booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps.” These are all the dead bodies lying in the saps, which is the small trench behind the main one. He gives us the description of all these dead bodies just lying there, with hands, legs and feet coming out every where. The second use of onamateapia is, “Sucking mud” As we can hear the boot of a soldier just sucking up the mud on the bottom of his shoe. As nearly all this first stanza is negative talking about the conditions and the dead bodies lying everywhere it comes as a surprise to end the stanza with, “And then the rain began – the jolly old rain!” But of course he is being ironic because the last thing the soldiers want is rain as it makes the trench a living hell. The whole trench becomes a pool full of mud. In the second stanza it says, “Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst” Now dose this mean that the soldier is mute to the terrific band of the shells because, he is so used to the sound that he doesn’t even notice it now. Or was it because he was in a slight daze and thinking this could be the end of my life ahead of me. I personally think that it is because he is in awe of what might happen to him if he gets hit my one of these shells. The first metaphor in the poem occurs on the 8th line in the second stanza, “While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke” Siegfried Sassoon is talking about the Germans running towards their trench. He wants us to imagine that they are as big as giants, as that is what they would look like deep down in the trench and with the added fear they would look bigger. Then the first sense of real panic, “An officer came blundering down the trench; Stand-to and man the fire step! On he went.. Gasping and bawling, Fire-step…counter attack!” We get this sense at the start of that stanza. He describes the officer as “blundering” as if he couldn’t get it out quick enough that they had to counter attack. Which then sends panic through us as we think they must be in grave danger. “Down the old sap; machine guns on the left” That line reminds me of the “Charge of the light brigade”, “Cannon to the left of them” Both of these are used to the same effect, panic. I feel that both of these lines work well. You can see the time period change as well. As the cannons have now been swapped by machine guns. Another line also reminds me of a different poem, “And he remembered his rifle…rapid fire” This is quite similar to the line used in the poem I will be looking at next, “Anthem for doomed youth” “Only stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle” Both are again being used for the same effect the sound in which these guns were making with the continuous rattle of the bullets being spat out of the gun. They are both using alliteration. The last four lines in the poem tells us of how one soldier dies, “To grunt and wriggle; none heeded him; he choked And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom, Lost and blurred confusion of yell and groans… Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned, Bleeding to death. The counter attack had failed” As a shell has hit him he is about to die but no body helps him because if they do it will be certain death for them too. Then he describes they way the man-fought death, he describes death as being a smothering gloom as if the smoke was smothering him. Then in the next line the repetition of down gives us the sense of watching his death as a bystander but we are helpless and he dies. As we can see Siegfried Sassoon’s “Counter Attack” is the most detailed poem that we will be looking at. I believe that this is the way war poems should be written. Not because of the level of detail he goes into describing the most horrid things. But because Siegfried Sassoon tells the truth. The last poem I will be looking at is “Anthem for doomed youth” by Wilfred Owen. Written at Craiglockhart, a war hospital where Owen was rested for 4 months after contracting Trench fever, this poem was probably inspired by the casualties he saw each day as young, dead faces passed from his sight daily. Wilfred, himself, was killed almost a year after he wrote "Anthem" and buried between two privates in the corner of a village cemetery at Ors. His grave was marked with a simple cross with a gravestone. In the first lines, we have the images of these young soldiers being sent off to slaughter like cattle. Here, war is not glorious, wonderful, or heroic. It is simply one large funeral where the usual death rituals are replaced with war's own. The church bells that ring when someone dies, have transformed into gunfire. One of the most important lines is the middle verse, , "No mockeries now for them; no prayers, nor bells." Here, Owen seems to be saying that the traditional rites for death are mockeries. The beautiful peal of bells and choirs is not, indeed what death it about. They only mock a miserable ending. Wilfred believes that the choirs of shells and rifles seems more appropriate to praise these lost ones in their inevitable death. The second stanza is even more haunting as he shows how there will be no real candles to mourn the dead, but only the candles of their blazed life seen in the glimmer of their eyes. He claims, this is their true good-byes, as the last light of consciousness extinguishes. Everywhere it seems, there is no time to mourn for the dead. When does anyone show the patience to consider a dead boy of the battlefield, he is seen as flowers for that dead person. In this poem, the ceremony of innocence has drowned. The last line, conveys not only the attitude of the soldiers, but also of some of the people back home, echoing a bit of Owen's frustrations about the civilian's refusal to acknowledge the horrible nightmare of this war. "And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds," Represents the soldiers need to move on and forget the death of comrades in an environment where people die every day. These doomed youth are killed, but they cannot be dwelled upon. However, this line is symbolic of how the people who profit from the war are taking the situation. They draw their blinds on the dead so they can feel better about sending more troops to the war. It seems as though this poem should've been written during the sixties at a time when anti-war sentiments were at their strongest but I wasn’t this poem was written ahead of its time. This poem doesn’t dwell upon the description of the dead bodies or the conditions. What it dose do is express the feelings of the soldiers. Which hasn’t been done too often. We can see clearly that the soldiers care for their dead friends in the war yet others do not. In conclusion I am totally against war poems which send out the wrong message. As I said before I don’t like poems that lie and give out the wrong image of war (“The Soldier”) but the poem which speaks the truth about war tells us about all the things people didn’t want to know years ago. Why live in a life of lies? You are only fooling yourself. I do love poems which tells the truth but as I mentioned earlier I don’t just like it because of the level of detail and I have shown this through my love of “Anthem for doomed youth”. Its doesn’t talk a tall about any terrible death. It just tells you of the feelings of the soldiers, which is just as chilling, as they also speak the cold truth. Even in today’s world we aren’t being told the real bone chilling details of the war in Iraq. The press only release only what they want to release. Mr. Bush told the American public that the war on Iraq would be swift and there would be minimal casualties. That hasn’t been the case the American troops are still there and they are still being shot at every day. I hope we don’t go back to the old way of live of living an old lie and the world is blindfolded from the truth. “ A war is going on, but the reason is undercover where’s the truth?” Black Eyed Peas 03 I feel this lyric from the song “ Where is the love” by the Black Eyed Peas is appropriate to begin my essay on war poetry as, in today’s war against Iraq nobody really knows why American went into Iraq. Was it not stop the evil that was there all ready? Or was it for something more important that Sadam, Oil. Because in approximately 30 years time there will be no oil left in the entire world and when it becomes extremely rare in a few years time who is going to be in charge of the world’s biggest oil supply in the world, America. Recently in my history course we have been studding Vietnam which has brought to live for me the realities of war. We saw numerous videos of America dropping nayplam bombs and then we saw the videos of journalists on the ground. Nayplam was originally used to fight the Vietcon as they hid in the forest and the Americans didn’t know where they where, so the Americans idea was to get rid of the trees and foliage they were hiding in by burning it via Nayplam. But Nayplam didn’t just burn the trees away, it buried human flesh away too. One of the videos showed this little girl running away from the bombing crying then as she ran past the camera we saw her back, which all the skin on one side had been burnt off. This really annoyed me. As the Americans had no right in Vietnam but they felt they had and so they felt they had to right to bombard the country. My feelings towards war have changed over time through maturity and mostly getting to see what war was really like. When I was young I thought that war just a simple matter of getting your gun shooting someone and then when you are bored, go home to your cosy warm house. You live in the war, and that war might go on for weeks, months or even years. But you have to stay for every last dreadful bit of it. You will not have a cosy warm home to live in for that time either or a meal every night. In war it’s a whole new life and a terrible one at that. You will have to live in trenches. Which will smell of your dead comrades lying beside you motionless. At night when you are trying to get to sleep you’ll feel the sharp nails of the rats running across you. You will not able to shower for weeks on end. Your meal if you are lucky to get one, might consist of just one small portion of meat. And if your lucky enough to get home in one peace you might come home to find that your younger brother died in the war which happened to poet, Siegfried Sassoon. Today I am against war. I feel it’s unnecessary, brutal and it destroys innocent lives and families. But war is inevitable. There is a flaw in human nature to fight with one another. We find it very hard to talk face to face with the person we hate the most, so it results in a war. War is also very costly as well. The Americans spend more on their Defence forces alone than all the armies in the world put together. It cost the Americans over $120 billion U.S dollars to finance the war in Vietnam. But the most costly thing in any war is human lives. America may spend the most money in the world on their defence forces but that doesn’t guarantee no loss in human life. Its amazing the loss in life in wars. But when one person’s life may be lost the other life may have been phyocologicaly damaged for life. In shell shock there is one instance, which I find chilling. One man had, had to kill another man face to face though he didn’t want to deep in his heart he had to save his own life. This is resulted in total disruption of his mind. Now every second of every day he has to re-live his killing in font of his own eyes. He ended up in a mental intitistion for the rest of his life. That was just one example out millions. There are veterans all over the world today that are living in metal intistions due to war. Men are disturbed the rest of their lives. Having nightmares every night, having to re-live that one moment in your life you wish to forget over and over and over again. Not being able to look at certain items that remind you of things you want to forget. Throughout this eassy I’ll be analysing, comparing and contrasting four war poems. They will be, “The solider” by Rupert Brooke, “The charge of the light brigade” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Counter attack” by Sregfried Sassoon and “Anthem for doomed youth” by Wilfred Owen Firstly I will be looking at, “The solider” by Rupert Brooke. This was one of the earliest examples of great war writing that is, in essence a dialogue between the living and the dead or in Rupert Brooke’s case the soon to be dead. Rupert Brooke was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, where his father taught classics and was a headmaster at Rugby School. In his childhood Brooke immersed himself in English poetry and twice won the school poetry prize. In 1906 he went to King's college, Cambridge. In 1910 Brooke's father died suddenly, and Brooke was for a short time in Rugby a deputy headmaster. Thereafter Brooke lived on an allowance from his mother In England he was a leader of a group of young 'Neo-pagans', who slept outdoors, embraced a religion of nature, and swam naked. The outbreak of World War I. interrupted Brooke's career as a writer. He was commissioned in Churchill's Royal Navy Division, and joined the Dardanelles expedition. Brooke did not see any action. He died of septicaemia as a result of a mosquito bite - or according to some sources of food poisoning - on a hospital ship off Scyros on April 23, 1915. Brooke was buried on the island. Henry James mourned Brooke's early death and the poet's legend was further solidified when Winston Churchill produced his own contribution to it with an obituary text. Around this time Poets would have always glorified war, and Brooke did his best to continue the tradition, and sacrifice himself in this effort. His death made him the hero of the first phase of the war and a canonised symbol of all the gifted young people destroyed by the conflict. However, Brooke's poetry with its patriotic mood and naive enthusiasm went out of fashion, as the realities of warfare were fully understood. His poem “The soldier” is about a man who loves his country dearly. This is country is England. He believes that if he should die in foreign field a far away battlefield that people should remember of him only that he was English. Brooke says in the fourth line, “In that rich earth a richer dust concealed” Which means that if he were to die in a land other than England that the soil would be made better because there would now be a peace of England within it. The plot of this poem reinforces the meaning because it deals with love and death.
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