Kamikaze by Beatrice Garland Poem Analysis

Hello and good morning, over the course of next 5 minuets, I will be talking about how societal pressures can affect family life, whilst using Beatrice Garlands kamikaze to further explore my ideas. But mostly just me analysing kamikaze awfully. Now, what exactly are social pressures? Social pressures can be defined as the influence exerted by society in encouraging individuals to change their attitudes, values, or behaviour in order to conform to group norms. In a sense, it removes our ability to make our own choices, well makes it seem like that is the only choice  

Now kamikaze explores the idea of choice and conflict, and examines the emotional traumas left behind, which can be carried down through the generations to come. But what does kamikaze even mean. First of all, kamikaze piolets were Japanese pilots who in World War II made deliberate suicidal crashes into enemy targets, which were usually ships. The term also denotes the aircraft used in such attack. But the actual word kami Kaze can be translated into an English phrase, and that being divine wind. The adjective divine implies the sense of honour and duty and the importance of this mission. 

Which could also be interpreted through the first line in the poem. ‘Her father embarked at sunrise’.  Now Japan has been recognised to be the ‘land of the rising sun’ for centuries, millenniums even. Which can be used as a symbol of the piolet's patriotism. And embarked gives us a sense of starting a journey, and by the title we know it is a one-way journey into a coffin. The kamikaze pilots begin their journeys believing that their life is insignificant against the success of their country in World War 2 and that their death is a necessary for the good of the country. 

The destructiveness of patriotism is portrayed throughout the poem. The first section is filled with vivid impressions of the five senses. Sight being used through colour and the surroundings, 'dark shoals of fishes' 'flashing silver', 'pearl-grey'. The senses of touch 'feathery', taste 'salt-sodden', they are all are evoked. These remind the pilot that he is alive, and for life its relishing. Yet, there is no mention of any senses in the section of the poem that dealt with events after his choice to stay alive. Insisting that he did not die physically but almost spiritually. His whole family never spoke to him again and it was like he did die. May I also just add that near the end of the poem, only two positive words appear. These being ‘laughed’ in line 36 and ‘loved’ in line 40. Something both these words have in common is that they are both in the past tense, which may empathise how there is nothing positive left  

‘They treated him as though he no longer existed...that this was no longer the father that we loved...he must have wondered which had been the better way to die.” 

Another important aspect of this poem is the narrator, Garland chose to have the narrator to be the pilot's granddaughter instead of himself. Which dramatizes the lack of individual power that the kamikaze pilot had: his own voice is silenced. He had been cut off by society and this poem being in third person only emphasises the distance between the pilot and the daughter. 

But we could also look at the structure of the poem, the poem has a tight structure. Each stanza is made up of 6 lines which could be used to resemble to tight control in the military and the culture and its expectations of what an individual should do. But contrasting with this tight control, the poem is written in free verse and contains numerous examples of enjambment. This contradicts the tight control and this freedom of expression reflect the freedom the pilot wants to have. And the conflict between his personal thought and his sense of national duty are reflecting between the conflict of structural points.