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Beatrice Garland · Power and Conflict Anthology
AQA10 questions available at this level
by Beatrice Garland
Beatrice Garland is a contemporary British poet and NHS researcher. Kamikaze was published in her 2013 collection The Invention of Fireworks.
The poem is inspired by the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II -- young men who flew suicide missions, deliberately crashing their planes into Allied warships. The word kamikaze translates as divine wind, referencing a typhoon that saved Japan from Mongol invasion in 1281.
In Japanese culture, the kamikaze missions were bound up with honour, duty, and sacrifice. Pilots were celebrated as heroes; their deaths were seen as the ultimate act of loyalty to the Emperor. To refuse or fail in a mission brought profound shame (haji) -- not just on the individual, but on the entire family.
Garland has said she was fascinated by accounts of the very few pilots who turned back from their missions. These men were shunned by their families and communities, treated as if they were already dead. The poem explores the impossible choice between duty to country and the instinct to live, and asks whether survival can be worse than death.
The poem connects to broader themes of conflict, identity, and the power of nature to remind us of what matters most.
“one-way / journey into history”
A chilling euphemism for the suicide mission: death is recast as an entry into history, as if the pilot were already a monument. The line break falls inside the phrase, so the reader, like the pilot, is carried past the point of no return.
“powerful incantations”
The pilot’s shaved head is filled with ritual chants, evoking religious and military preparation. He is wrapped in ceremonial language that has readied him for sacrifice: culture, not personal will, drives the mission.
“green-blue translucent sea”
Rich colour imagery evoking the vivid beauty of the Japanese coastline. "Translucent" suggests clarity and openness, the opposite of the murky moral situation the pilot faces.
“cloud-marked mackerel”
A precise, tender detail from the catch his father’s boat brought home (stanza 5). The compound adjective shows the pilot truly seeing, and remembering, the world around him, reconnecting with life rather than death.
“no longer existed”
His wife and the neighbours enact a social death: the pilot is physically present but treated as if he were gone. The comparison (stanza 6) presents this as a deliberate, chosen act of erasure, and in stanza 7 the children are taught it too, so the silence is learned, not natural.
“the better way to die”
The last words of the poem leave its question unanswered. The word "better" is bitterly ironic: neither option offers a good outcome. The pilot must choose between physical death and social death.
[Stanzas 2 to 5: the fishing boats, the sea and the shoals below him, then the catch his father’s boat brought home]
The natural world is presented as beautiful, free and alive, a direct contrast to the death mission. What the pilot sees from the air stirs a memory of home, and together they pull him back to life, representing everything he would lose.
“silver ... dark”
Garland uses a palette of colours to contrast life and death. The flashes of "silver" (stanzas 3 and 5) and the green-blue sea of stanza 2 evoke beauty and vitality, while "dark" (the shoals, and the tuna at the end of stanza 5) introduces threat. The recurring silver creates a motif linking nature to hope.
“like bunting”
Seen from the air, the fishing boats are compared to strings of festive flags: the scene below looks like a celebration of life, the opposite of his mission. In stanza 3 a second simile likens the moving shoals to an enormous flag swinging from side to side, which may recall the national flag he flies for.
[Stanzas 1, 6 and 7: the outside narrator, then the daughter’s own voice, then the narrator again]
The poem moves from an outside narrator's retelling, through the daughter's imagining as she tells the story to her children (stanza 2), to her own first-person voice (stanzas 6 and 7), and back to the narrator for the last two lines. This layering of perspectives shows how the story has been passed down, fragmented and incomplete.
[Whole poem: the mission begun at sunrise against the social death at home; the beauty of nature against the duty to die]
The poem is structured around contrasts: life vs death, duty vs instinct, honour vs shame. These oppositions create the moral tension at the heart of the poem and resist simple resolution.
[Stanzas 1 to 5: one sentence runs on across all four stanza breaks, as from stanza 4 into stanza 5]
Lines run into each other without pause, creating a flowing, continuous movement: the first five stanzas are a single sentence. This mirrors the pilot's unbroken train of thought and the relentless pull of memory and nature.
by Simon Armitage
by Jane Weir
by Carol Rumens
Rights notice: © Beatrice Garland (b. 1938), from The Invention of Fireworks (Templar Poetry, 2013). The poem is paraphrased line by line here, not printed. Quotations from “Kamikaze” are short fair-dealing extracts under CDPA 1988 §30 (criticism, review, quotation). For full text, students should consult the board-licensed AQA Power & Conflict anthology or Garland’s collection.