What Saves Us Poem Analysis

What Saves Us and The Way of Tet by Bruce Weigl are two poems that find the small pockets of beauty in war amidst all of its’ ugliness and elaborates on that beauty with Weigl’s powerful and eye opening writing techniques. Weigl writes with painstaking care and every syllable, adjective, and break is surgically placed here and there to evoke specific emotions from the reader. Bruce Weigl approach to writing is captivating and pure. In the first poem What Saves Us Weigl writes about a young man who is preparing to deploy to Vietnam. The first half of the poem is entirely about the main character’s desire to have sex with his presumed girlfriend. “The next morning I would leave for the war.…. I thought to myself that I would not die never having
Weigl’s purpose behind this is to give the main character innocence and to alter the reader’s perspective of the main character from a amourous manly soldier to an overwrought teenager who is fighting a war he had no say in. This somber realization evokes empathy within the reader. The line “We are not always right about what we think will save us” (605) is the most awe-inspiring and thought provoking line in the poem. The reader will automatically place extra emphasis on this line of the poem because the poem’s title is in it. Weigl crafted this line to be intentionally ambiguous and that is an aspect that only makes the poem more captivating. “We are not always right in what we think will save us” (605). Readers’ can interpret this statement in numerous different ways. The initial question that will be probably be etched into many readers’ minds is “Is God even real?”. To read a poem one must start at the title, and when a person reads the title to the poem What Saves Us we subconsciously call Jesus Christ to the back of our minds. Jesus Christ our Lord and “Savior”, the man that supposedly died on a cross to “save” humanity. It can be implied that the main character also questions the legitimacy of religion but there is not concrete evidence within the text as to if he does or does not. In the closing lines of the poem the main character says
Objects described in the opening scene of the story such as “Saigon graveyards” “Buddhas” (606) and burning incense make it apparent to the reader that the story is taking place in an Asian country. There’s not enough information given in the text to determine which country specifically, but Vietnam is safe assumption. Fives lines into the poem, Weigl wastes no time getting into one of the more vulgar themes of the story, sex. “weary bar girls burned incense before the boy soldiers arrived to buy tea and touch them where they please” (606) these couple of lines briefly describes the central bonding agent between U.S soldiers and native populations, specifically women, in warring countries. Weigl’s description of U.S military personnel as “boy soldiers” implies to the reader that the majority of these soldiers are probably problem prone, hyperactive, American youth. The story moves onto the lines “touch them(the girls) where they pleased. Twenty years and the feel of a girl’s body so young there’s no hair is like a dream” (606). Scanning these lines is comparable to telepathically mind reading a seasoned pervert’s thoughts. The Asian women in this story are sexually objectified and are treated unkindly by soldiers. “living is a darker thing….. he remembers her twisting in what evening light broke