A World Revolved Under Each Man’s Eyelid.

         Komunyakaa’s poems, “Camouflaging the Chimera” and “Facing It” both have a similar underlying theme: war. In “Camouflaging the Chimera”, Komunyakaa describes the horrors of Vietnam war.

            The first three stanzas takes the reader into the dangerous terrain and captures the uncertainty that this terrain has and uses strong imagery that allows the reader to envision the riverbank in Vietnam. In the first three stanza, Komunyakaa uses literal imagery to describe the terrain and then, in the seventh, stanza, he uses figurative imagery, “wrestling iron through grass. / We weren’t there. The river ran/ through our bones. Small animals took refuge / against our bodies; we held out breath,” this stanza is embellished with abstract imagery and captures the soldiers’ fear. The soldiers are trying so hard to blend in with the jungle of Vietnam, that eventually the jungle becomes a part of them. The title of the poem, Chimera, is a mythical monster that is composed of one or more creatures. The title suggests that the Chimera is the jungle and the soldier’s surroundings but I think the Chimera can also be man itself and the war as well as the jungle because men were the one who created this war. Nonetheless, Komunyakaa does an outstanding job capturing the Vietnam jungle and its enigma.

            In “Facing It”, Komunyakaa takes the reader to the Vietnam Memorial. However, Komunyakaa does a brilliant job in revealing flashbacks and using the Memorial as a backdrop to recount the many memories that surrounded the war. By gazing at the memorial, the speaker (who I believe is Komunyakaa himself) that the memorial wall is not just some granite stone that has names engraved on it, but it is something he identifies with on a much deeper level. The speaker tries to fight to keep in his emotions but the wall triggers flashbacks of the past to come trickling back in the surface of his mind, haunting him.

            Overall, the technique Komunyakaa uses the most to make his poems come alive is visual imagery by using personification, metaphors, and other figurative language to take the reader to the place the poem takes place. These two poems are haunting and truly expresses the horrors of the Vietnam war.