1.

Danger of political ideology – Burnside says danger is identity politics/Duffy says danger
is in naivety to ideology
2. Role of poetry and romanticization – Burnside luxuriates in it, offers a bridge to
authenticity/Duffy is horrified and disdainful of it
3. Religion – Burnside believes that Religion was always a guise for tribalism / Duffy says
that religion existed, and end of god = end of sanity and hope
4. Disdain for violence – Burnside acts as a guiding teacher/father / Duffy condemns

Compare the methods that both poets use to present danger the world.

In History, the speaker, who seems to be Burnside himself, reflects on a day soon after 9/11
where he and his son go to a beach in St. Andrews. The threat of future danger is therefore a
significant aspect of this poem and haunts the thoughts and actions of the characters within the
poem. Duffy’s A Wound in Time was written for Armistice Day and discusses the endless
suffering of war that characterized the 20th century as a whole. The constant and overwhelming
presence of danger is therefore crucial to the poem’s message.

Both poets discuss the dangers of political ideology. Burnside, however, attributes this danger to
identity politics and the dangers of group identity, whereas Duffy emphasizes that it is instead
naivety that encourages danger. Burnside, through stream-of-consciousness, states that ‘what
makes us who we are’ is ‘something lost’. The lexical choice of lost can be presumed to suggest
that identity is something that is completely extinct, and that the characters in Burnside’s poem,
and hence, society as a whole, have completely lost their true sense of self to ‘kinship’ and
‘given states’. This is the identity of the group taking priority over the identity of the self.
Burnside links this idea to danger at the mention of people ‘stopping to watch as the war planes
cambered and turned in the morning light’. War planes have replaced the natural role of birds in
an uncanny imitation of the events of 9/11 (where planes similarly ‘cambered’ towards the twin
towers in New York) and through this, symbolic violence and memory of mass destruction have
assimilated into the natural world. The special attention that people pay to the event, ‘stopping’
their daily routine in order to acknowledge the situation, creates a sense of shared mourning for
not only the events, but the individual’s misplaced sense of self, and the acknowledgement that
all they have left is the violence and pain of destruction. Cohesively, Burnside links the danger of
9/11 to lost personal identities and overdependency on kinship.

Although Duffy also confronts the issue of kinship (the ‘town squares’ or communities, are
‘silent’), Duffy is significantly more concerned with the danger of naivety. As the speaker can be
presumed to be Duffy herself, she chastises the past and poses the rhetorical question ‘But how
could you know, /brave as belief as you boarded the boats, singing?’ The alliteration of the
consonant ‘b’ creates a sense of frustration and aggression towards the events, which is then
linked to the idea that the men were ‘singing’, an action closely associated with innocence, youth
and naivety. To Duffy, the danger of ‘endless sacrifice’ is only prevalent because of endless
ignorance on the parts of the controlling powers of the world. Although Duffy doesn’t mention
political ideology specifically, in fact, she makes a point of suggesting that the details are
irrelevant when considering the overall pattern of violence and war, the choice of word
‘sacrifice’ implies that there is a constant price being paid for a better future, and therefore
attributes the pattern to the consistent needs of new ideologies to pay for unattainable futures
with human life. Duffy is therefore criticizing the naivety of every regimen that seeks to
overthrow another for its propensity towards violence.

Both poems share similar themes of disdain for violence and danger. However, the two poets
differ in that Burnside acts as a guiding, educating father-figure, where Duffy takes a much more
accusatory, detached stance on danger. Burnside acts as a father figure both as a character within
the poem (since the poem is autobiographical) and as poet in positing his views towards the
reader. Burnside creates the persona of a traditional father when voicing the anxiety towards
danger in the world by offering didactic guidance (the imperative ‘be afraid’ is an example of
this), guiding the reader through the text through frequent enjambement, and ‘protecting’ and
sheltering the reader from the greater dangers of the world through the use of euphemism
(‘evidence of life in all this/driftwork’ reducing the violence and pain and anxiety of human
existence simply into the word ‘driftwood’). This is all done with the intention to guide the
reader into understanding and rationalizing the needless suffering of history. This motive is
established in the title of the poem ‘History’ and the subtitle that identifies the context of the
poem within the aftermath of 9/11. Although the poem engages with many ideas, from the
environment to the idea of God, the overarching theme is 9/11, and is shown through the fact that
the poem is essentially a 9/11 sandwich with the first and last stanza laced with anxious imagery,
the ‘gasoline smell from Leuchars gusting across/the golf links’ and ‘quail-grey’ outlines of
people in the distance and the parents ‘all nerve and line’. The violence of history is therefore a
perceived threat to Burnside and uses his position as poet to guide the reader through their own
anxieties surrounding danger.

Duffy, contrastingly, approaches the issue of violence and danger in the world with contempt and
disgust. In the lines ‘What happened next?/War. And after that? War. And now? War. War.’ The
interplay between frantic questioning and single word sentences creates a sense of power and
anger towards the perpetual nature of violence and suffering. In this sense, Duffy reproaches the
situation by not inserting the persona of the speaker directly within it, through use of pronoun (or
lack thereof). Although Duffy does use first person pronoun ‘we’, the lack of use of ‘I’
immediately distances the speaker from the errors and danger of the society depicted within the
poem and absolves the speaker of any personal blame of his/her own.

This idea of moral accountability is linked to the idea of religion, which is prevalent within both
poems, acting as a protection against danger. Burnside discounts the existence of religion in a
pure sense of the existence of God and implying that it is simply a guise for tribalism. Duffy
however, suggests that religion is an imperative aspect of humane societies and the death of such
an ideal signifies the death of civility and security. In Burnside’s poem, there is the suggestion
that the paramount form of worship is the worship of the material earth and the natural and
environmental aspects of human existence. This idea is communicated in the line ‘reading from
the book/of silt and tides’. The enjambement between ‘book’ and ‘of’ creates a pause within the
reader’s mind between the two, subtly drawing an allusion to the book of God instead. Burnside
therefore insinuates that it is problematic and inauthentic to associate with a higher power
outside of out evolutionary and biological surroundings since they are simply another guise for
the ways in which we are ‘confined by property’, and hence, that ideas of religion incarcerate us,
where love and worship of the earth set us free. This quasi-religious standpoint, whether directly
reflecting on a belief in God, offers the view that we can effectively avoid the dangers of
confinement with a greater appreciation for the natural world.

Duffy offers a similar, but more explicitly religious view on the subject of danger. Duffy
explicitly states that the ‘The end of God’ comes about in the ‘poisonous, shrapneled air’. On a
surface level examination, this is Duffy explicitly stating that the death of God is an indicator of
ultimate, unbridled turmoil, and that on the other hand, the existence of God is a signifier of a
stable, happy society (An allusion to chaos and order of the antichrist, perhaps). On a more
nuanced level, however, Duffy is making a point that the situation is so dire that the single
indicator of morality and justice, religion and God, must recede into the environment in order to
preserve itself from the danger of a corrupted humanity. This idea is further articulated in natural
imagery of the ‘century’s tides’ ‘chanting their bitter psalms’, where nature has been reluctantly
forced to take the mantle for the extreme lack moral accountability in war-torn human history,
since humans have resorted to cheap barbarism and extreme moral relativism. This ultimately
suggests that danger engulfs society when religion has been forsaken.

The grim nature of this reality is communicated through both poems through the
acknowledgement of the role of art within the context of the poem as a coping mechanism
towards danger. In Burnside’s poem, art and romanticization is acknowledged to alleviate the
pain and offer relief towards the anxiety of life. Duffy, on the other hand, belittles the role of art
and its inadequacy in depicting human suffering (and therefore, danger). Burnside luxuriates in
the power of art. Throughout the poem, Burnside uses erudite descriptions in order to create a
sensory, immersive atmosphere of the natural world: ‘transitive gold jamjars of spawn/and
sticklebacks’, for example. This idea extends to visual layout of the poem, as the untraditional
structure of free verse used makes the poem extremely visually appealing, a kind of abstract
expressionistic interpretation of Burnside’s surroundings, aside from simply a literary one.
Burnside uses this in order to illustrate an escape from the brutal danger and upsetting ‘history’
that plagues the society depicted within the poem, perhaps because it is the only way to ‘be alive
in all this gazed-upon and cherished world/and do no harm’, which Burnside identifies as ‘the
problem’ (the article ‘the’ almost gives this phrase a title, placing it at paramount importance).
Burnside further links this idea of the power of art to childhood curiosity within his son, Lucas,
as Lucas offers the transition from the anxious present into the sensory theoretical imagination.
The mention of Lucas on the 12th line moves the semantic field from that of banality and fear,
‘gasoline’, ‘quail-grey’, ‘news’ and ‘war planes’ to one of curiosity and harmony ‘gathering’,
‘life’ and ‘shells’ suggesting that his presence is the key to developing a sense of wonderment
towards the world, that which is expressed through art and imagination. This wonderment and its
expression through art is communicated as the antidote to danger in the world.

In Duffy’s poem, art plays an equally important role. However, instead of seeing it as the
antidote towards the danger and agony of human existence, Duffy sees art as a completely
ignorant simplification. This is shown in the metaphor ‘Your faces drowning in the pages of the
sea.’ The face represents the identity, personality and identification of a person, and by
suggesting that such a concept is ‘drowning’ in ‘pages’, Duffy is suggesting that the art created
about them, perhaps more specifically, the poetry and literature surrounding them, is inauthentic,
and instead of facilitating the processing of the heavy emotions that are attached to war and
suffering, consumes them in a way that hurts and overwhelms them. Although this metaphor
could be equally interpreted to be the pages of a history book and therefore suggest a loss of
identity and the callous fashion in which history recounts its dead, it is perhaps more consistent
with the poem as a whole to consider the former, considering the violent imagery in ‘poetry
gargling its blood’, which very clearly condemns poetry’s inadequacy in illustrating the bloody,
savage nature of war and the physical, corporeal threat of warfare and combat.

In conclusion, both poets discuss their theme of danger within their respective poems,
condemning it and illustrating the psychological horror that is prevalent in a dangerous society.
Burnside perhaps has a more positive outlook on the situation, with a more opportunistic outlook
that focuses greatly on the potential of the future. Duffy’s main aim in her poem, however, is to
illustrate a pessimistic and unflinching view of the perpetual, unchanging nature of war, and that
there really is no opportunity to change.