Poetry Precis 4- "At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border"

 In the poem, "At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border" William E. Strafford uses a bitter tone through which the message that places of war are not the only ones to recognize. From the first line of the first stanza, "this is the field where the battle did not occur", the speaker states that the piece of land which he will describe is not a battlefiled but instead just a place where peace thrives.  "This is the field where grass joined hands, where no monument stands" yet since no one died here, this place is not considered monumental or valuable. In the second and final stanza of this poem, the speaker shows how this  "ground hallowed by neglect" has become a place where the air is "so tame that people celebrate it by forgetting its name." Through this statement and the rest of the poem, the speaker conveys how this simple place that has experienced no violence but instead, compromise and agreement, is not celebrated or spoken about because all the focus lies on battlefields and places with monuments of wars. The speaker's point is that the places that should be remembered are often the places where no monument lies because it is typical for monuments to stand where wars occurred but not where peace prospered.