Warning Letter Prompt

Prompt: You are going to assume the identity of Joby from “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh,” Ashton from “A Glimpse of Heaven,” or the unnamed child soldier from “Blue Child: A Civil War Poem” and write a letter warning a friend (one of the other characters) about how a certain symbol can serve as a danger in their lives and how you learned the hard way about a symbol in your life.  Remember that a symbol can come in the form of an animal, abstract idea or physical object.

Requirements: 

• Choose one symbol from the short story or poem that you chose.
• Choose one symbol from one additional short story or poem.
• At least 3-4 pieces of textual evidence that show the danger of the two symbols.
• A minimum of 2-3 paragraphs that explain the danger of the two symbols.

__________________________________________________

10/31/1861

Dear Ashton:

I risk mailing these letters behind enemy lines because I believe the bond of friendship is stronger than the brute of men who wage this war. I still remember the days in which we picked peaches in your grandmother’s backyard and ate them under the river birch trees while we watched the train chug past the plantation. I still remember the days before our fathers sent us off to the army to enlist in a cause they believed in, but were too old and weak to fight for. That memory helps me dream of days in which you and I are no longer defined by the colors blue and gray. I want you to see those days too, but if you don’t stop avoiding the reality of death like I did, I fear those days will be only bitter, meaningless dreams.

I too feared death before I stepped foot onto the battlefield. I feared death so much that I felt the moths and peach blossoms at my campsite were taunting me with reminders that “nothing had a name” and “nothing was as it once was” (Bradbury 320). The world around me was changing rapidly and I feared that I could be taken from that world at any given moment. I feared that I “was only a toy in a game to be played tomorrow or some day much too soon” (321). Then, I met a General who had reminded me that I was much more than a target because the drummer boy is “‘the heart of the army”‘ and can command an entire army with the single stroke of my drum. He said that if I  upheld my duties and faced death on the front lines, I could tell the story of being the drummer boy at owl creek “‘many years from now”‘ (323).

You need to face death too before it greets you unexpectedly. When you told me in your last letter about the conversation you had with your comrade Kimble on the afterlife, it seemed you were avoiding the conversation of death with him. It seemed you “couldn’t really comprehend what was happening in the war” (Trammell 1). Death represents your inability to accept the process as a natural part of war or life itself. Death represents your inability to “face reality” on the subject (2). You can neither fight death though, nor hide from it, however. You don’t have to accept the idea that there is an afterlife, but you shouldn’t cower from it either.

I hope this letter finds you well before the “sunset never arri[ves]” and you are left to die  “on enemy soil” (6).

Sincerely,

Joby