Short Summary of “The Colonel” by Carolyn Forche

The poet explained her visit to the Latin American military regime. The details of everyday life are like his children, and his wife is like his typical Western luxury lifestyle.

At the same time, the pistol on the mat other than him showed the fatal aspect of the officer. Its existence will be revealed in something like pet or paper, any scenes in any house. The naked moon made the house feel emptiness and sorrow. The police program shown in T.V. shows colonel's preference in English.

A broken bottle buried in the wall symbolizes a colonel who attempts to leave his enclave. After supper, Maid called the Admiral and introduced the lifestyle of the colonel's royal family. "A kind of bread" means that the poet is a new country so it is not used to bread.

Parrot said, "Hello" on the terrace, and the language barrier was obvious. The colonel closed the parrot, showing what he wanted to hang himself in the government, and showed voices of dissidents and spokespersons.

The role of the poet seems to be very passive, as he was trying to answer the colonel about how he enjoyed the country, the Spanish T.V. advertisement was interrupted. All of this shows that the voice of the poet is not important. The subsequent conversation seems to be hosted by the colonel, this is not a discussion or discussion where all of them are participating.

The colonel's audience was clearly silent about the hostility of the poet and her friends, and the atmosphere became very tense and strange, there was communication between them, but that inevitably the eyes I was begged through.

The poet 's friend said that he was silent in a blink of an eye. Ironically, when human eyes contract from food bags and dry, visualization gets worse. As the grocery bags suggest the presence of root vegetables, the poets introduced them as half of dry peaches.

The poet was inevitably shocked by the ears of the people on the table just finished eating, that gave the poet a stern statement of "there is no other way to say that". A long time has passed since the poet saw this incident, but she still recalls that when he fully understood the visual reality of the human ear it was deliberately inevitable.

One of the active ears in the water is the expression of the dead, and they are suffering from this anger. Ears are living evidence of torture and violent oppression as they may still come from living prisoners. Some people imagine hope remains in the ears, and some outsiders will advertise their own pain.

Another unfair image I encountered is the ear that Carolyn Forsch used in the poem "colonel". Generally speaking, the ear represents memory, awakening, and personality, but in this verse it represents the dead. In this poem Caroline met Colonel of El Salvador. He completely opposes human rights and holds the numerous human ears that he cut during the war. Each ear represents a soldier who lost his life in the war. She used the next line to tell the anger of the colonel to the United States and took their policies "He took one of them and shook it to our face and threw it into the glass." (921) This is done to make people aware that they are not related to human rights. The image of the ears used in this verse is not highly recommended for readers. She uses it not only to use his ears to express the fraud he went with his own ears but also to focus on the cruel image of the soldiers during the war.

It was written in 1978 when Forsch was working at Amnesty International in El Salvador. It was a summary of a cruel encounter with poetry title "Colonel". Forche explained that the hero is a tough man in the violent world. "Colonel" does not care about the rights of his subordinates, and introduces his poor character into the poet in the poem. (Logan 1) According to William Logan (2007), the purpose of this poem is to explain the nature of barbarians reflected in the structure of poetry, which is equally cruel to the eyes and ears. .