“Poetry is obsessed with ideas, nervous and bloodied with emotions, all held together by the delicate and hard skin of words”. Here the American poet Paul Engle manages to reveal the core of poetry beneath the stanzas, the verses and the technical aspects: the emotions. The strength of the poem depends on the weaknesses represented by the poets' characters because, ultimately, the easiest way to control one is to tug at the heartstrings a little. No one won hearts with a showy show of strength. Thus, emotional language is a weapon of great effect if handled correctly, which the poets of the six poems mentioned do successfully. Carol Ann Duffy's "War Photographer" illustrates the emotional suffering of a struggling war photographer as he is alone "in his darkroom" (a place of peace and tranquility) reflecting on the agony he has witnessed. The religious metaphor in the first stanza is particularly effective because it compares the photographer to "a priest preparing to chant a mass." Regarding how he must convey knowledge of war zone victims, similar to how a priest offers moral instruction or perhaps even prepares for a funeral mass to remember the deceased. From a different perception, the use of these religious images could be interpreted as the photographer's confession and request for forgiveness for taking such horrific photos. Duffy used this silent, emotional unraveling of the photographer to invoke the reader's sense of pathos; we empathize with the photographer's moral sacrifice for a greater cause. Regardless of the context, when children are presented with pain and terror, the emotional value is taken to the next level. Duffy takes advantage of this cleverly, when he mentions the "fields... middle of the paper... conclusion", readers will be able to relate to the feeling of loss as well as the paternal/maternal instinct of protect your offspring, which it is eternal through humanity and nature. All these war poems have great emotional power depicted by the poets and instilled in the reader. Poets effectively use these emotional stimuli to open up a flow of emotions that they can then use to manipulate the reader's reaction to certain situations. Novelist Salman Rushdie sums up the purpose of poems with a quote: "a poet's job is to name the unnameable, point out frauds, take sides, start arguments, shape the world and keep it from falling asleep." And that is ultimately what these poems did; manage to make the world aware of the atrocities of war throughout the times, as well as push us to keep our actions in check and refrain from such inhumane acts.