What would be a good thesis statement about the poem Song of Napalm? 2. what are 4-5 Craft Elements used in this poem. (Also site examples for...

This is a poem about being haunted and the aftermath of
the war. In the last stanza the poet remembers the girl that tried to run away after the
Napalm was dropped and she was hit:

she
is burned behind my
eyes

And not your
good love and not the rain-swept
air

And not the
jungle
green

Pasture
unfolding before us can deny it.

The poem ends
by reminding the reader that the events of the war are forever etched into memory,
"behind my eyes", and nothing can bring relief from the memory. I suggest if you are
attempting to go the interpretive route with your essay, you could argue in your thesis
that the traumatic memory of the Vietnam war can't be erased by time or the return to a
normal life. The poet reiterates that in other lines as well
 :

So I can keep on
living,

So I can
stay here beside you

for
instance.

Regarding your our question of poetic devices, remember
that this is a free verse poem, so there is no rhyme scheme in particular, but the form
of the free verse lends itself particularly well to convey the brutality of the act the
poet witnesses-the dropping of the Napalm. Form thus matches content. The poem also
works with similes. E.g.

Trees scraped
their voices into the wind, branches
Crisscrossed the sky like barbed
wire

You also see in this line that the poem
carries sentences over ("branches" could have appeared in the next line since it comes
after the comma). This technique prevents a feeling of closure, which is what the poet
reiterates in the last line for instance. The line above also illustrates a
personification ( trees scraping their voices). Literally, the world is coming alive
around the soldier, and not in a good way. Finally, fire in literature is quite often a
very romantic motif, but this changes with literary accounts of the United States
annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WW II and the trauma of the
Holocaust where burning became a metaphor for the wholesale destruction of the Jews. In
the poem, the fire is caused by Napalm and the girl is literally burned alive before the
eyes of the soldier. Fire is thus connected not only with destruction and burning alive,
but also with forced witnessing and the creation of unerasable traumatic
memory.