Explication of Diane Thiel’s "the Minefield"

Diane Thiel’s poem “The Minefield” is about a man who’s mind has been ravaged by memories of a war in his childhood. She shows that even though the war had been over for years, the memory of it haunted the man in everything that he did. Through a powerful combination of symbols, dark images, and a split chronology, she creates a full picture of a life changed forever by war.

In the first stanza, the tone is lighter, describing a scene where two boys are running through towns. The boys race, the faster one being described as a “wild rabbit”.

This stanza feels dream like, the organization of thought is loose, and word choice seems almost erratic, almost unrehearsed. The first stanza ends with a twist. The faster boy is killed by a mine and his friend, just seconds behind, witnesses the whole thing.

The second stanza is only two lines, “My father told us this, one night,/and then continued eating dinner.” This stanza breaks up the chronology of the poem, pushing the previous stanza into the past, and making it disjointed, almost like another poem in itself. The result of the father continuing eating after he tells the story