Summary
The final stanza concludes with the photographer examining the fully developed black-and-white photographs that he has created, describing them as “a hundred agonies.” He ruminates on how a newspaper editor will select five or six of these one hundred photographs to be published in Sunday’s newspaper, in the supplement section outside of the main articles. He imagines the British readers shedding a few tears while they look at the horrific images, but quickly moving on to their Sunday routines of taking baths and drinking beers before lunch. The photographer imagines himself in an “aeroplane,” or airplane, staring impassively, reflecting the impassivity of his readership.
Analysis
The final stanza completes the narrative arc of the poem by describing the completed photographs, which are now fully developed, as a “hundred agonies in black and white.” This line also creates symmetry with the first stanza, which described the developing photographs as “spools of suffering.” By symbolically reducing the photographs to the emotions they convey—suffering and agony—Duffy heightens the emotional impact of the poem and establishes the theme of the trauma and suffering of war. The use of the word “hundred”—notably, the poem leaves ambiguous whether there are actually a hundred photographs or whether this may be a deliberate exaggeration—conveys the extent of agony that the photographer has witnessed. Along with the references to multiple war sites in the first stanza, the use of the word “hundred” conveys the repetition and ubiquity of war, despite its horrifying impact on the countries that are involved in it.
However, unlike the first stanza—which emphasized the gravity of war through the reference to suffering accompanied by a metaphorical comparison to religion—this stanza creates irony by pairing the descriptions of “agonies” with the “impassive[]” response of the photographer, editor, and readers. While the photographer has witnessed a “hundred agonies,” each with their own specific story and message, the editor is confined to only publishing “five or six.” This is a metonym for the way in which wars more broadly are obscured and remain unnoticed by those who aren’t directly affected. Newspaper readers see only a slice of war, and still images cannot capture the full extent of warfare’s atrocities.
Finally, the concluding couplet creates an image that is like a photograph itself—a visual depiction of the photographer staring out from an “aeroplane,” surveying the landscape below “impassively.” This couplet can read again as the photographer trying to compartmentalize just as his readers do. Like the photographer, the readers have a “job to do”—to live their daily lives—and are only momentarily shaken, their “eyeballs prick[ing] with tears” before returning to their occupations, interests, and routines, such as bathing and drinking beer. Imagining his English audience unshaken by the photographs of war and returning to their “ordinary pain,” as referenced in the second stanza, the photographer then pictures himself in a distant airplane, staring “impassively” back at his readers and reflecting the impassivity with which they receive his photographs. For the desensitized readers, the photographer is simply “earn[ing] his living” and while the images are horrific, they are also routine, published weekly without any cessation of the conflict. While the photographer himself initially describes his job as a way to “earn[] his living,” it is clear from the preceding stanzas that he cannot truly view his role so clinically, as he is viscerally affected by the trauma he has witnessed. The final line—“they do not care”—ends the poem on a note of despair or ambivalence, decrying the desensitization of the modern British audience in the face of widespread wars during the 1970s.
