Guiding Question: How is the tone of the poem established and how

does this develop?

The free verse poem “Shooting Stars” by Carol Ann Duffy conveys the struggles of a
Jewish woman in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. The speaker in this poem
is nameless and unidentified, indicating that the hardships expressed throughout the text
have been experienced by many other individuals following the same religion as her. Duffy
establishes the tone in the text through the use of imagery, then continues to develop it to a
tone of resilience and bounces up her tone from hopelessness to hope to speak up for the
Jews who have suffered under Nazi rule through juxtaposition. For example, Duffy begins
with a tone of despair when she describes "the stars on all our brows" (3rd line, 1st stanza),
symbolizing the differentiation between those who were targeted and died at the hands of
the Nazis (Jews) and who were not (the rest of society). This imagery conveys the speaker's
helplessness and fearful tone that was affecting the Jews' lives and leaving them
traumatized. However, as the poem develops, the tone does as well, as Duffy shifts it to
resilience. She uses juxtaposition like "between the gap of corpses I could see a child" (10th
line, 3rd stanza) to convey her determination to inform the reader of occurrences she has
witnessed and the death of an innocent child in contrast to those who have already
experienced the taste of death and the violence of war in general. The speaker seems to be
determined to voice out the child's death and emphasize the cause of her death, "They shot
her in the eye" (12th line, 3rd stanza) in a sentence, expressing the women's desire to
enlighten the readers on the consequences of war implying a call to action and serves as a
warning for the reader to never repeat these violent acts and crimes on innocent people.