In ”The Bright Lights of Sarajevo”, the writer made sure to use imagery by portraying war as massacre, ’blood-dunken crusts and broken dead’. War is meant to be taken seriously, but not to the point where people would do nothing else but hide. Alliteration can be seen on the verse ‘death-deep, death-dark wells’. This could be seen as a way of representing war as death, tragedy. ’Often dodging snipers on the way’. This passage mentions ’often’. This is how they live, by escaping persecution to get to safety. The writer used repetition in the first stanza with the citizens ‘queuing and queuing’. It is clear he is trying to show how tough the lives of Sarajevans must be, by pointing out their struggle for resources. ‘In unlit streets you cant distinguish’. It seems that the status of the setting has gotten so violent up to the point where people try to kill each other without even realizing who they’re killing. They don’t care if they are killing ‘a Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark’. While the victims of the poem are the citizens of Sarajevo, it does differ from ”Disabled”, since this poem talks about one mans thoughts of his post-war life. The soldier talks about how ‘they smiling wrote his lie’. It can only be assumed that hes referring to the government who he signed up for to go to war. It is very possible that the government recognised his early age and did not care to sign him up, since there …show more content…
In “Bright Lights of Sarajevo”, destruction is everywhere. However, this feelings of sadness are smothered by love and attraction. The mention of the second couple gives the appearance that Sarajevo is full of human relationships. It doesn'tt matter whether its husbands, wives, children or parents. They cope through the situation by staying with each other. In the first stanza, the writer mentioned ‘the tender radar of the tone of voice’. This couple has just met, but by the looks of it, they are feeling pleasant with one another. A radar is an object detector, and in this case the writer played with the words by using it as a love detector. Not only that, but there are multiple references to stars, even in the title. There is a particular phrase, “‘fragments of the splintered Pleiades’. Pleiades is a small cluster of stars in the constellation Taurus. Stars often symbolize purity and advancement in life, coincidentally reflecting one of the themes of ”Bright lights of Sarajevo”. This is clearly not the case for the soldier in “Disabled”, since he has no one left, but himself. His isolation from everyone crushed his hope. The rhyming scheme in Disabled is mostly irregular. This asymmetrical point suggests the instability of his head and how confused he is. This was never the case in ”Bright Lights of Sarajevo”. The structure is fluid(AA, BB, CC...). Perhaps the reason of why