"Lessons of the War: I: Naming of Parts", more commonly referred to simply as "Naming of Parts", is a
poem by
Henry Reed, in which a lecture on the parts of the
Enfield rifle
Enfield may refer to:
Places Australia
* Enfield, New South Wales
* Enfield, South Australia
** Electoral district of Enfield, a state electoral district in South Australia, corresponding to the suburb
** Enfield High School (South Australia)
...
[ Point of Balance: A Lesson in "Naming of Parts"]
by Roger Hyndman, in '' English Journal''; Vol. 50, No. 8 (Nov., 1961), pp. 570-571+577 is juxtaposed with observations about nature in springtime. It was first published in the magazine ''
New Statesman and Nation'', in August 1942.
Reception and analysis
Roger Rosenblatt calls it a "clever trick" of a poem, and emphasizes how the nomenclature of the rifle parts "mimics the flowering of spring".
[Essay: The Naming of Parts]
by Roger Rosenblatt, at '' PBS NewsHour''; published July 29, 2002; retrieved February 3, 2019 Susan Manning
Susan Manning is a dance historian and Professor of English and Theatre at Northwestern University where she holds joint appointments in the English Department and Performance Studies. She is currently chair of English at Northwestern. considered it to be "a studied, ironic catalogue of some parts of experience silencing others" which "excludes more than it includes", noting the presence of "the beauty of nature and its utter irrelevance to the human struggle".
[Naming of Parts; or, The Comforts of Classification: Thomas Jefferson's Construction of America as Fact and Myth]
by Susan Manning
Susan Manning is a dance historian and Professor of English and Theatre at Northwestern University where she holds joint appointments in the English Department and Performance Studies. She is currently chair of English at Northwestern. , in '' Journal of American Studies''; Volume 30, Issue 3 December 1996 , pp. 345-364
Vernon Scannell observed that the poem is
contrapuntal
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more musical lines (or voices) which are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. It has been most commonly identified in the European classical tradi ...
, in that it contains the voices of both the instructor and the trainee; he also outlined a "thread of sexual innuendo" which "becomes unequivocal in the third and fourth stanzas".
["Henry Reed and Others"]
in ''Not Without Glory: Poets of the Second World War'', by Vernon Scannell; published 1976 by Woburn Press, London; excerpted at Sole Arabian Tree
Origin
While serving in the
British Army during the
Second World War, Reed "would entertain his friends by giving a comic incitation of a sergeant-instructor", and subsequently became fascinated by the
cadence of "the utterances of the NCO"; these formed the basis for "Naming of Parts".
[
]
References
{{reflist
External links
Multiple versions of Henry Reed, reading "Naming of Parts" aloud
at Sole Arabian Tree.
1942 poems