flag essay

How does John Agard present his views on War and Conflict in the poem “Flag”

Throughout time, flags have given men connotations of bravery, identity and solidarity, showing a belonging to a particular culture or set ideology. Within the poem, Agard attempts to strip back all of the cultural connotations of what a flag represents and take a more literal approach to it being “Just apiece of Cloth”.
In doing this, he presents man as the cause of wars, and shows how flags have, throughout time, been manipulated to force others to conform to the beliefs of the ruling few. Agard uses key linguistic, structural and poetic devices to show this.
Firstly, he makes a clear use of pronouns to describe the flag such as “that” and “piece of cloth”. This immediately takes away any cultural assumptions of the flag and reduces it to its base form.
By using repeated interrogatives such as “what’s that fluttering in a breeze?”, “What’ that unfurling on a pole” and “What’s that rising above a tent?”, he creates a structure which helps to show the move into battle, and how flags are used to evoke cultural pride and ideologies. By using progressively dynamic verbs, from fluttering, unfurling to “rising”, he creates a metaphor for human reaction to opposition in War.
By using the alliteration of bringing a “nation to it’s knees”, he creates almost a rhythmic march. This, coupled with a very structured a,b,a,c,b,c,d,c,d rhyme scheme makes it quite lyrical, as if almost a song sang whilst marching into battle, of which the flag would be a key symbol.
However, the final stanza the interrogative becomes much more philosophical, asking how he can “possess such a cloth”. In using the dynamic verb of “bind/blind” when discussing his conscience, he suggests that to go to war, or to fight for a flag, you must lose any sense of moral righteousness. By using the verb “bind/blind”, it gives a pragmatic sense that it is others who make the soldiers believe this view, and it is not entirely their own. It is also ironic that the narrative perspective turns to first person, asking how “I” can get such a cloth, perhaps showing how the propaganda of War has affected him, and how he too would now wish to fight.
Agard cleverly personifies the effect of the flag by using the collective pronoun “nation”. This again gives a sense of humanity. There is also a duality to the word “knees” as it can on one hand suggest worship, yet can also be juxtaposed to mean despair or destruction.
By using plosive alliteration in “will outlive the blood you bleed”, Agard creates a tone of anger, and a sense of summation as he pragmatically suggests that War, and fighting for your country is not a new phenomenon, yet something which ahs happened for centuries, and will happen again. By using a direct 2nd person pronoun of “you”, he directs it at the reader, yet may also suggest a more generic you – a faceless “you” of the soldiers who fight the battles, therefore creating a lamenting tone.
Finally, the poem ends with the sentential of a rhyming couplet. What Agard hereby suggests is that to fight for the “flag” and what it represents, we must become blind to all of the pain, suffering and horror that it brings.