Smoke
Smoke - meaning Summary
Ordinary Reading, Distant Violence
The poem contrasts a calm domestic moment with distant wartime devastation. The speaker repeats the ordinary line "I sit in a chair and read the newspapers," while the middle lines catalog mass death, ruined cities, and disappearing lives. The repetition and imagery compress enormity into a brief, detached observation, suggesting numbness, distance, and the inability of routine to register full moral weight of collective suffering.
Read Complete AnalysesI SIT in a chair and read the newspapers. Millions of men go to war, acres of them are buried, guns and ships broken, cities burned, villages sent up in smoke, and children where cows are killed off amid hoarse barbecues vanish like finger-rings of smoke in a north wind. I sit in a chair and read the newspapers.
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