"Facing It"

The speaker of "Facing It" is Yusef Komunyakaa himself, speaking as the Vietnam war veteran that he is. The poem seems to be very personal to the speaker and the attitude is very serious while also sad/scared as the speaker is transferred back to his memories.

I find the language of this poem to be a rather simple colloquial language. It's very casual. The entire poem is about the Vietnam war and the people who died during it, and my entire focus was on that. I tried looking for allusions while reading it another time, and I couldn't find any, so I don't think this poem really has any allusions.

I think the use of metaphors, similes, analogies, and personification to be very well done in this poem. They add so much to it, giving the reader a glimpse inside the speaker's mind to see the things that still haunt him from his past. They give the poem a very intense feeling.

While I found all those, the things I couldn't find were alliteration, assonance, and consonance repetition. Either there were none, or they just didn't stand out to me in an obvious way, because I really did try to find some. Because of this I didn't notice any effect given to the poem by these, since I couldn't really find any.