"War is Kind" is the first poem of Stephen Crane's second collection of poems, War is Kind and Other Lines, published in 1899. The subject of the poem is war and its effects. The poet uses imagery and irony to make a picture of the uselessness of war.
             The title gives us an ironic tone of the poem, as it is very difficult to understand a war being kind in any way. "War is Kind," a twenty six-line poem, focuses on the emotional loss of three women whose lover, father, and son have died in war. Crane's descriptions of the fallen men in the first, third, and last stanzas suggest the evil of war and its inherent cruelty. The second and fourth stanzas gives more common images of war and the cruelty about the military. These lines gets across a sense of the soldiers' exhaustion and uselessness, as they fight with the flag, "unexplained glory," flying overheard. Crane uses emotional imagery which stresses the horrible effects of battle on the human body. The tone of his descriptions is ironic. He does not mean that war is kind, but unjust and cruel. An example is in the third stanza where the father "raged at his breast, gulped and died." He uses repetition in the first, third, and last stanzas, telling the loved ones not to weep, because "war is kind." An example of irony occurs in the second stanza when the speaker says "Great is the battle-god, great and his kingdom." The speaker obviously does no mean that the battlefield is great and glorious, but shameful. It is also ironic that war's "kindness" means the freedom of the soldiers' death from their suffering. The speaker of the poem, both sympathetic to the victims of the war and scornful about the purposes of the war, shows the graphic scenes of the battlefield death and the emotional distress of the people left behind. One of the most effective emotional appeals Crane uses is downplaying...