Spender And Sankichi Two Views

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withdrew his birds of war, four hundred thousand British citizens had been killed, forty-six thousand had been seriously wounded, and one million homes had been leveled. After one raid, a relief team helped a woman who had covered been covered in powdered brick and plaster and was bleeding profusely. As they aided her, she repeated four words continually in a tone of quiet terror: "Man's inhumanity to man…Man's inhumanity to man…" (Jablonski 148).
Stephen Spender was in London for the duration of the bombings. He saw the demolition of surrounding buildings. He heard the droning of approaching bombers. He smelled the smoke of raging infernos. In his autobiography World Within World, Spender describes his mental condition during the raids as a "trance-like condition" and describes how he forced himself to think of places and things as merely mental concepts in order to avoid losing mental control (285).
Hiroshima's destruction came without warning. Japanese ...

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from shards of glass and atomic bomb sickness, which may have contributed to his early demise in 1953.
Spender's "Epilogue" and Sankichi's "Dying" differ dramatically in presentation. The titles illustrate the basic contrast. Spender's poem is an epilogue to what he compares to a play: It is written after a raid is over and is a reflection of what Spender has witnessed. Sankichi's poem possesses immediacy because his narration begins at the moment of detonation. Spender focuses his attention on the city of London as a whole. This viewpoint is possible because he had already experienced months of bombardment and had tried to separate himself mentally from the events transpiring ...

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