Read the first stanza of Christopher Barnes's "PROPAGANDA 39" and a scene builds from fragments: onlookers on an iron bridge, a staccato of "rat-a-tats", whistles that "hurtled", craters cutting up the paths, glass coming "unhinged". The poem never names a war, but the imagery suggests a bombardment watched from a safe distance, with gunfire, falling shells and shattered windows. Then the poem repeats the scene almost line for line, with every judgement swapped for a more comfortable one. The title announces the central idea. Propaganda doesn't have to change the facts, only the words wrapped around them.
The pairing rewards close attention. "Mortified spectators" become "Spectators intoxicated". "Mortified" means ashamed or humiliated, and it carries the Latin root for death. "Intoxicated" turns horror into a giddy thrill, and its own root goes back to poison. "Flat rat-a-tats" becomes "Flat ums and ahs", so the sound of gunfire gives way to the hesitant noises of people talking, as if violence had been converted into commentary. "Lurid whistles", which are garish and shocking, turn into "Nightfall whistles, melodious". The adjective now trails behind the noun like the end of a lullaby. "Craters defeated paths" has a culprit, since something does the defeating. "Vanishing ragged paths" has none. The paths simply fade, and nobody is to blame. The last pair is the most slippery. "Glass unhinged" suggests both a broken window and a broken mind, while "Air-nips turned glass" sounds like frost, almost like weather. My reading is that the destruction has been renamed as nature.
The short middle stanza is the poem's hinge. Five words are stranded and staggered across the page: "spectators", "Flat", "whistles", "paths", "Glass". They are what survives in both versions. Four are nouns, the things that exist whichever way the story is told, and the fifth, "Flat", is the one adjective that never gets replaced. The stepping layout leaves gaps the eye has to cross, which makes a neat picture of the space between an event and its report. This stanza works like an X-ray, showing the bare skeleton once the spin has been stripped away. The lingering "Flat" may hint that both accounts, the horrified and the cheerful, are somehow deadened, though that is an inference rather than something the poem says.
Sound does as much persuading as meaning. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only clipped lines of three to five words, many with no main verb. The first stanza is packed with hard consonants. "Craters defeated paths" is almost all stops and clicks, like a sequence of blows. The final stanza softens. "Melodious" and "vanishing" are full of liquid l's, m's and long vowels, and the commas give "Nightfall whistles, melodious" a gentle pause. The language is sanitised in the ear before the reader has stopped to think about it, which is exactly how propaganda tends to work.
What makes the poem significant is that it doesn't lecture about manipulation. It makes the reader do the comparing. Many readers will notice that the second version is the more pleasant one to read, and that discomfort is the poem's point. The number in the title hints at a series, though the poem stands perfectly well alone. In very few words it shows how small the changes need to be: a handful of swapped modifiers, one missing agent, a softer sound. The most chilling shift belongs to the spectators, who start out mortified and end up intoxicated. The poem suggests that propaganda succeeds when the audience's feelings change, even if the wreckage stays exactly where it was.