The Gift

“The Gift”
by Timothy Clover


The loss of the ability to empathize with or care deeply about other people is a theme that has always underlined the Vietnam War. This is shown in the many instances Americans have heeded of men killing innocent Vietnamese civilians for no apparent reason at all. However, in his poem “The Gift,” Timothy Clover expresses the guilt the war had bestowed him and his uncertainty of US motivations for fighting in Vietnam.
“The Gift” is personal narrative written in the first person by the late Timothy Clover. In this poem, written during the Vietnam war, Clover speaks with a Vietnamese boy younger than the age of six. The poem is broken up into three stanzas; the first stanza contains four lines consisting of an alternating rhyme scheme and a set of rhyming couplets at the stanza’s close, the second stanza is 12 lines formed by rhyming couplets, and the final stanza is a simple four lines with the last three rhyming. Though there is ...