The document summarizes and analyzes the poem "Come On, Come Back" by Stevie Smith. It discusses the main themes of showing the consequences of conflict and how war can have psychological effects. It also analyzes the structure, language, and intended audience of the poem. The poem tells the story of a young girl soldier named Vaudevue who is left on a battlefield and later found drowned in a lake.

1. ‘Come On, Come Back

2. Themes and Ideas
• The main theme running through the poem is showing
the consequences of conflict and how it can even affect
those not involved in war.
• One other key idea that is explored here is the idea
that war can have psychological effects upon people as
well as physical. One example of this is found in the
quotation: “Only her memory is dead for evermore”.
This quotation shows that conflict can be a very
negative event which can affect a person extremely
without physically injuring or killing them. The word
“evermore” emphasizes the fact that the events in
conflict are unchangeable and can cause issues forever.

3. • Austerlitz': the poet imagines a future battle on an old
battleground. Austerlitz is now in the Czech Republic, but in
1805 it was in Austria. Napoleon defeated the armies of
Russia and Austria..
• 'Memel': the German name for a coastal town in Lithuania.
Stevie Smith imagines it as the location of a Conference
assessing methods of exterminating human beings.
• Memel came under German rule after the Napoleonic Wars,
but was reclaimed by Lithuania when the Memel Statute was
signed by 4 countries, including Britain, in 1923.
• Nazism became popular in Memel and anti-Semitism grew;
when the Nazis were elected to govern it in 1939, the
territory was seized back by Hitler’s German forces and
became increasingly anti-semitic, leading to its 1300 Jewish
inhabitants being expelled.

4. • Structure
• Each stanza ends in a full stop and tells a clear part of the story – but a
lack of punctuation within the stanzas means the meaning is sometimes
unclear. This gives the poem the feeling of a dream.
• Stanza one - Vaudevue is left on a battlefield at night.
• Stanza two - she is scared.
• Stanza three - she heads off to a lake nearby.
• Stanza four - she swims up river.
• Stanza five - she is drowned.
• Stanza six - a border guard (sentinel) finds her clothes and calls out across
the water for the owner to return.
• Stanza seven - he then carries on calling, playing a pipe he has made while
waiting.
• Stanza eight - the song turns out to be a favourite marching song of
soldiers everywhere. Vaudevue does not come back, however, because
she is already dead.

5. Language
• On the very first line of the poem a strong metaphor is used, “Left by the ebbing
tide of battle”. This sets a feel for the poem immediately and shows the reader
that conflict, much like the tide, can be an extreme danger and is something to be
wary of.
• Another metaphor can be found on line 44 “In the swift and subtle current’s close
embrace” in which Smith uses personification to cause the reader to feel the pain
that he is trying to portray through the death of the “girl soldier”. Which is a key
phrase as well as it is showing that she might not even be old enough to
understand fully what is happening and why.
• Smith does not appear to use any sound effects in the poem other than the
repetition of ‘Come on, Come back’ which is repeated three times to make the
reader remember it and to make it stand out in the text. The idea behind its use in
the poem is that it is represented as a song that soldiers from both sides enjoy and
remember, this could be to represent that the ‘Enemies’ in war may not
necessarily be so different to themselves. This may also be used as an extended
metaphor as it sounds like a shepherd calling his sheep, which is referenced to in
line 14 and line 39.

6. Structure
• The poem is split into eight Stanzas which have
around six lines each, however some are much
longer and some are much shorter.
• There is no clear structure as to how many
syllables are in each line however a lot of them
have between seven and nine syllables.
• As this means that the poem is split into relatively
long sections, the poem can tell a story without
interruption but is still short enough to keep the
readers attention.

7. Audience
• We believe that the voice of the poem is
talking to people involved in war, or people
that do not know the consequences of war as
it is explaining the effects of war and how
damaging it can be.