Thanks By Yusef Komunyakaa Analysis

Yusef Komunyakaa is widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished poets at truly capturing the emotions and experiences of war. His ability to write not only from the perspective of his own experiences, but to embody the viewpoint of others, gives a voice to those who saw a story in a different light. Komunyakaa himself served as a journalist in the Vietnam War and several years later, he began to write poetry remembering his experiences (Salas 34). His most famous anthology, Neon Vernacular, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1994, contains a wide variety of poems about growing up as an African American in the Deep South, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Vietnam War. In Yusef Komunyakaa’s free verse poem “Thanks,” a hopeless soldier …show more content…
He says, “I know that something / stood among those lost trees / & moved only when I moved” (37-39). The speaker continuously insists that there is someone else with him, but in reality, this denies the truth that the soldier faces the brutal war alone, and that the something in the trees is just himself. Since Komunyakaa himself fought in the Vietnam War, the soldier in “Thanks” is a reflection on Komunyakaa’s own experiences. The Vietnam War occurred during the Civil Rights Movement, a time of high tension between white and black people. As such, Komunyakaa and the soldier’s feelings of loneliness in the war may not have come from being physically isolated, but from the discrimination he faced both during and after the war as many African American veterans did (Martin 126). The soldier in “Thanks” strives to feel protected and safe, which is why he creates this figure of someone protecting him, when in reality, he is alone. This connection also explains the soldier’s attachment to the land of Vietnam because since he feels isolated within the group of other soldiers, he finds comfort in the fact that the land is keeping him