Comparison of Recruiting and The Target!!!!

1. Recruiting is showing the public the truth behind the propaganda "Lads, you're wanted, go and help." The Target is very blunt and shows what can really happen on the front line.
2. Both poems use guilt to emphasize their message.
3. Both use caesuras and enjambments.
4. In recruiting the second and fourth lines rhyme in every verse (ABCB) whereas the Target uses rhyming couplets.
5. Recruiting is very literal and doesn't describe much emotion, however, the Target uses a lot of imagery and is visceral.
6. Both tell that the soldiers will die no matter what happens. In the target the poet writes as a soldier who has just killed another man but did not have any choice because he did it to save himself.
7. Both have a mixed number of syllables per verse, this shows that the poet hasn't focused on this.
8. Recruiting is probably written about the poet's own experiences as he was an officer in WW1. Ivor Gurney was also a soldier in WW1 but a lesser one than E.A. Mackintosh and so is showing his own experiences and what he probably had to do.
9. Ivor Gurney writes about the people left at home and all their worries about their relatives on the front line. E.A. Mackintosh however tells them to forget their other life and to learn to "Live and die with honest men."
10. Both poems have four lines in each of their stanzas, which is the typical length for a poem.

Alexia, Katie, Laurie and Felicity.