"Homecoming" is a 1968 poem written by Bruce Dawe. It is included in Dawe's collection Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems, 1954 - 1992.
"Homecoming" is an anti-war poem written about the Vietnam War. The poem describes the process of collecting and processing the dead from a war and shipping them home. Dawe uses imagery, irony, paradox, repetition, accumulation, and metaphors to portray deep emotions. At the beginning of the poem, the dead bodies are treated like garbage, being put into plastic bags, thrown recklessly into trucks and convoys and having no identity whatsoever until they arrive in Saigon, where they are given names and stored in freezers like piles of meat.
Homecoming by Bruce Dawe is a poem about the Vietnam War, it is an anti-war poem describing the process of war and bringing the dead soldiers back home. The war inspired Bruce Dawe to write this poem and the message behind this poem is that war is futile and that lives are wasted at war.
Repetition is used in this poem to emphasise the monotony of the continuous activity involved in war. For example “All day, day after day” this quote emphasise the monotony and repetitiveness of the soldiers’ death. Dawe describes how the soldiers are constantly dying and therefore the process of bringing them home occurs “All day, day after day.” Another technique utilized by Dawe is alliteration of the “d” sound, and the “ay” sound these sounds are hard and mournful giving the impression that something difficult and sad is happening. This further emphasises the futility and destruction that war creates.
Bruce Dawe also uses irony to create his message about war. His use of diction and irony in the title “Homecoming” makes the responder initially think that the poem may be cheerful and happy as the word “homecoming” implies a time for reunion and celebrations. However Dawe ironically uses ‘homecoming’ to depict the great sadness of dead soldiers transported back home. Homecoming is about the journey of the dead soldiers as they get transported home, the title itself creates the image of a happy and joyful journey; however Dawe ironically uses this to describe the sadness and melancholy of the dead soldiers’ journey as they are transported home. The poem suggests that not all journeys are happy and that even though they may seem so, they don’t always end well.
copy of the poem:
All day, day after day, they're bringing them home,
they're picking them up, those they can find, and bringing them home,
they're bringing them in, piled on the hulls of Grants, in trucks, in conveys,
they're zipping them up in green plastic bags,
they're tagging them now in Saigon, in the mortuary coolness
they're giving them names, they're rolling them out of
the deep freeze lockers-on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut
the noble jets are whining like hounds,
they are bringing them home
-curly-heads, kinky-hairs, crew-cuts, balding non-coms
-they're high now, high and higher, over the land, the steaming chow mein
their shadows are tracing the blue curve of the Pacific
with sorrowful blck fingers, heading south, heading east,
home, home, home-and the coasts swing upward, the old ridiculous curvatures
of earth, the knuckled hills, the mangrove-swamps, the desert emptiness...
in their sterile housing they tilt towards these like skiers
-taxing in, on long lunways, the howl of their homecoming rises
surrounding them like their last moments (the mash, the splendour)
then fading at length as they move
on to small towns where dogs in the frozen sunset
raise muzzles in mute salute,
and on to cities in whose wide web of suburbs
telegrams tremble like leaves from a wintery tree
and the spider grief swings in his bitter geometry
-they're bringing them home, mow, too late, too early.