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How does Beatrice Garland present her ideas about blame and forgiveness in family life in her poem Kamikaze?

Considerations
1. Overview: Garland presents poem in seven, six-line stanzas with impact. Starts with third-person description with daughter imagining her father making his decision to turn back. Then moves to first-person description of how daughter remembers his family - blaming and punishing him with their silence.

2. Form and structure of the poem: different narrators (third-person, then first-person) mark changes in perspective which brings the reader close to the storyteller. Suggests ideas around blame have changed over time.

3.Poet imagines the pilot's moments in the cockpit: filled with the language of vivid impressions (colour, light, dark, taste, touch) and with metaphor and simile ('tuna, the dark prince', 'like a flag'). Emphasises father's discovery of how much he wants to live. Conversational, relaxed rhythm and language suggests speaker takes a balanced, thoughtful view.

4.Simple and factual final stanzas: shift in time and speaker - this emphasises the surprise twist that the pilot decided to turn back. Final three lines show the stark reflection that his life was lonely and sad on his return, that he may have thought he made the wrong decision; this appears tragic and senseless to the reader.

5.Different views: one view suggests the starkness of the conclusion to the poem may imply a refusal by the daughter to be tender - perhaps she continues to blame her father. Other view suggests the memories are too painful dwell on.

6.Conclusion: Garland uses changes in narrator and tense to signal how our views change over time. The daughter does not blame the pilot, but simply lets the facts, as she imagines them to be, speak for him. His response is presented as human and natural. The confessional tone and the sharing of the story with a new generation suggest a forgiving attitude.

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The language Garland chooses appears to be natural and every day. However this apparent ordinariness conceals some effective literary devices which invites the reader to think about what the pilot may have seen from his plane. It adds to the power of that moment, but also shows the daughter has thought about the same scene, time and time again.

An individual

metaphor

appears: 'a tuna, the dark prince' and the image of 'the loose silver of whitebait' suggests a comparison with coins, or possibly sunken treasure. The impression on the reader is of the great wealth of the sea.

Garland makes great use of sense impressions, include sight (colour and light/shade - eg 'green-blue translucent', 'dark shoals') and of taste (the 'salt-sodden' boat).

The fish imagery used in the poem suggests the great wealth of the sea

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Comparison of 'Kamikaze' by Beatrice Garland and 'The Émigrée' by Carol Rumens

Similarities

Both poems are about outcasts: a shunned father in

Kamikaze

and an exile in

The Émigrée

.

Both poems use unrhymed stanzas with no strict metric pattern to suggest everyday speech.

Both poems mention powerful impressions of the senses such as colour and shade eg 'green-blue translucent' and 'dark shoals' in

Kamikaze

and 'sunlight-clear', 'every coloured molecule' and 'my shadow falls as evidence' in

The Émigrée

. Both poems mention taste - 'salt-sodden' is used in

Kamikaze

and 'tastes of sunlight' is used in

The Émigrée

, showing the vividness of these imagined thoughts for the speakers.

Differences

Garland uses a combination third-person narrative and first-person narrative whereas Rumens uses first-person narrative only. Garland's changes of narrative person have a distancing effect for readers, allowing us to see the poem's events from different perspectives.

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Beatrice Garland's poem reflects the immense social pressure brought to bear on the pilots to carry out kamikaze missions as part of Japan's war effort during World War Two. Although we may think of this poem as being about a specific military practice carried out by Japanese pilots during wartime, the poem also has a strong contemporary relevance. Instead of simply thinking of the poem as being about a military strategy in the distant past, it might also prompt the thought that suicide missions are part of contemporary conflicts too and are very much in the news.

The poem perhaps prompts us to, think about the consequences of suicide missions for families in the modern world as well as in past conflicts.

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BEATRICE GARLAND - KAMIKAZE FULL POEM ANNOTATED ON GENIUS 

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BEATRICE GARLAND - KAMIKAZE FULL POEM ANNOTATED ON GENIUS 

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https://genius.com/Beatrice-garland-kamikaze-annotated

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"Her father embarked at sunrise with a flask of water, a samurai sword"

Items with cultural significance convey his patriotism.

"a shaven head full of powerful incantations"

Mantras have been drilled into him by his commanding officers.

"enough fuel for a one-way journey into history"

Death was imminent but left behind a great legacy.

"but half way there, she thought, recounting it later to her children"

His own daughter never listened to his explanation. His legacy now was a failure.

"on a green blue translucent sea"

He was reminded of the beauty of nature and saw an image of heaven.

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The word “Kamikaze” originates from Japanese, from ‘kami’ (divinity) and ‘kazi’ (wind) [Divine wind], originally referring to the gale that, in Japanese tradition, destroyed the fleet of invading Mongols in 1281.

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The word “Kamikaze” originates from Japanese, from ‘kami’ (divinity) and ‘kazi’ (wind) [Divine wind], originally referring to the gale that, in Japanese tradition, destroyed the fleet of invading Mongols in 1281.

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The poem changes to italic/font during the penultimate stanzas and a previous line to indicate the change of speaker, from the narrator/translator to the daughter it appears as if the daughter is passing on the story to her own children and the narrator is explaining this process.
The final couplet hits home the themes of the poem quite dramatically in a very sombre tone but does not offer opinion, challenging the reader to come to their own decision.
The consistent structure uses quite regular syllable patterns drifting up and down in  length, this gives the poem a tone of nostalgia, but also the rhythm of the waves which can represent a helplessness, that things will happen, whatever you do, he will still ‘die’ in one way or another. The use of asides and calm rural language juxtaposes the setting of war, giving the poem a much more personal scope on a major event.

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The poem is set in a time and topic of conflict, however the real conflict is between the rules of a society ‘honour’ in Japanese culture, and the will to survive and return to a family. The conflict is particularly profound because there appears to be no right answer and the pilot dies, one way or another, in the eyes of his family, if not in body, the poem explores the futility of trying to avoid your own fate/destiny.

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Towards the end of WWII, Japan was losing the war against American forces who were advancing towards the Japanese home islands. To defend, a special unit of the Japanese air force was formed, known as kamikaze pilots - their sole purpose to deliberately crash their planes in to American warships. Kamikaze pilots were on suicide missions, and their sacrifice was seen as both a religious and patriotic obligation. Key Meaning • Questions war and patriotism.

Kamikaze pilots were expected to use up all their weapons and then suicide by flying into their targets as a final act of destruction. It was considered a great honour in Japan to die for your country. The pilot in this poem returns home and is rejected by his family forever after, his own wife refusing to speak to him.

The poem is written both from a narrator and the daughter of the pilot. The narrator explains the events, almost translating the story, while the speaker gives a first person account of how they excluded her father.
The poet questions at the end which death would have been better, to die as a kamikaze pilot young or to grow old with a family who shut you out,