Hi everyone, I just wanted to share a quick comparison between one of our poems and a different text from earlier in the semester 🙂 While reading To the Prussians of England by Gurney, what struck me most was the poem’s confrontational directness. The title already stages this tension—addressed to the “Prussians of England” rather than merely describing them—while the poem’s movement between the accusatory “you” and the collective “us” and “we” aligns the speaker with the soldiers at the front and exposes the hypocrisy of those who glorify the war from afar. This rhetorical pressure immediately reminded me of the tonal force Nellie uses in Not So Quiet when she condemns her mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington, women who embody the home-front ideologies that demand sacrifice without understanding its cost. Both Gurney and Nellie deploy direct address as a deliberate counter to the sanitized language of wartime patriotism; they transform private anger into public accusation. I feel that their bluntness collapses the supposedly “comfortable” distance that many non-combatant works—or simply the era’s propaganda—depend on.