19 pages • 38 minutes read
Yehuda AmichaiThe Diameter of the Bomb
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1979A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
The poem is a free verse poem written in a stichic form. A stichic poem is a poem that consists of a single stanza descending down the page, without any separate sections or stanza breaks. This form is effective at increasing the emotional impact of the poem, as the poet describes the bomb in a continuous train of thought, evaluating the bomb’s effects with increasingly devastating imagery. This highlights the connection, from the first factual observation to the final image that explores the impact the bomb has had on society. The poem’s emotional power is compressed into a single stanza, threading the poet’s thoughts on the bombing from its very first moment of impact to its incalculable effects on the entire world.
Diction
Amichai uses a particular diction to create a sense of mood, and the changes in his word choice as the poem progresses allow the reader to feel the full impact of the bomb’s true capacity for destruction. The mood is calm and unemotional in the first five lines, with a relatively mundane account of the bomb’s technical effectiveness using the language of an engineer or a scientist. The diction that Amichai uses develops an atmosphere of mourning and destruction in the wake of the bombing, with Amichai describing “a greater circle of pain and time” (Lines 5-6) that widens to include nearby towns and the family members of those who died during the bombing. The language becomes more metaphorical and more emotionally expressive as the poem moves on to describe “the lone man” (Line 12) who cries over the death of a woman that was caused by the bombing. The diction becomes more personal and more laden with feeling as Amichai shows the deep personal impact these deaths cause for the living, especially those who are innocent and must simply endure events that they can neither control nor understand.
Imagery
The richness of Amichai’s language develops an imagery of the terror of war and its unforeseen human cost. The imagery in the poem shifts dramatically after Line 12, in which Amichai strikes a humane and sympathetic tone through the image of a single man in a state of sorrow following the death of a woman in the bombing. The man’s distance from the location of the bombing creates the emotional thread between an event that occurred on one side of the world and the results of that event on the other side of the world. Amichai leaves a great deal of ambiguity in this moment, only saying that the man is “faraway” and in an “unnamed” country (Line 13). The lack of specificity in the imagery creates a more universal and accessible audience for this poem. Amichai emphasizes that all war causes pain and horror for humanity as a whole, bringing the entire Earth into the circle (Line 14). He is not laying the blame on any particular nation as the villain, or portraying any country as a victim. This adds to the idea that the bomb involves the entire world in its destruction, which Amichai effectively develops by contrasting this result with the first few lines of the poem when the bomb is portrayed as a small, non-threatening device. The imagery of the entire world in Line 14 also repeats the imagery of circles and globes but this time it encompasses the bomb’s true “range,” which affects us all.
In the last four lines of the poem, the imagery becomes even more emotion-laden with a spiritual component injected. Amichai also involves sonic effects by mentioning “the crying of orphans” (Line 15), a description of the effects of war that creates an emotional response in the reader of sympathy and sorrow. The death of one of the individuals in the bomb’s range orphaned multiple children, bringing another consequences that was not foreseen when the bomb was dropped. The poet brings in the spiritual component through the image of the orphan’s woe affecting God. This image creates an even larger circle around the bomb, one that surpasses the earthly plane.
