Reflections on James Doyle's "Civil War Photograph"

            In his poem “Civil War Photograph”, James Doyle describes an old photograph of a Civil War battle. The narrator’s description focuses on the battlefield in the photograph more than the physical object; however, the reader comes away with a vivid image of both the photograph itself and the battle that the photograph depicts. Doyle manages to convey the sheer carnage of the battle and the cold, relentless precision of war itself. An important feature that distinguishes this poem from other war poetry is that Doyle does not describe a battle, but rather a photograph of one. His careful construction of the poem gives the feeling of a moment frozen in time, differentiating a photograph of warfare from a live conflict.

            The conceit in “Civil War Photograph”, war written as mathematics, truly sets the tone of the poem as a whole and, in my mind, sets Doyle’s poem apart. Doyle introduces this metaphor in the first couplet, the first line in fact, and only deviates from it for the last couplet. There are many ways to approach war as a subject of writing, some choose to focus on the wild, uncontrollable, primal feel of each man fighting desperately for survival and the victory that he sees as the only path to continued existence. Doyle largely turns away from this angle and instead centers his poem on the emotionless calculating nature of organized combat. The civil war, perhaps the last fought in the old style of armies facing each other in lines on a battlefield, seems to lend itself well to Doyle’s view and the metaphor he uses to convey it. Doyle takes each segment of the photograph that could be emotional and turns it into math. In this manner, he writes that “limbs illustrate opaque angles” (Doyle, ln 2) and “the sky rotates three hundred sixty / degrees around eyes burning / black zeroes into its center” (Doyle, ln 3-5). Part of the effect on the reader that Doyle’s conceit has is that the reader comes to see the battle almost through the lens of a detached analyst. Doyle dehumanizes war and instead focuses on the battle as a whole, rather than the suffering of the individuals. This does make sense; even though it eliminates the opportunity of an emotional connection to the reader, after all, a person can only get so much of the human feel of battle from a photograph.

Doyle did not use any rhyming pattern or fixed meter in “Civil War Photograph”. In fact, he does not utilize line-end rhyming at all. The only set form to speak of is that Doyle wrote exclusively in couplets, nine in total. However, Doyle does use other poetic techniques to help convey his ideas. Doyle frequently uses both enjambment and caesuras to the effect of lending the poem the tone of someone analyzing the photograph as he describes it, talking continuously before stopping abruptly and moving on to another part of the image. Doyle also uses a lot of seemingly reversed imagery and personification throughout the poem, resulting in lines like “rifle stocks / that won’t be stripped of hands” (Doyle, ln 7-8) and “the scratched lens / is a blackboard solving equations” (Doyle, ln 13-14). This imagery also serves to remove the human element of battle from the poem, diverting the action of the piece to things like inanimate objects and body-parts. Camera imagery like “scratched lens” and “into focus” (Doyle, ln 18) also features in the poem as a nod to the original subject of the work, through which the battle is seen, a photograph. Overall, “Civil War Photograph” does not resemble a conventional poem about war and death; however, Doyle’s different approach to the subject highlights the other side of battle, the unavoidable mathematics of conflict, and this change of pace makes for a unique and memorable poem.  

This poem can be found at http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14977