are annulled by the ‘monstrous anger of the guns’. The ‘voice of mourning’ choirs were replaced by the sound of ‘wailing shells’.‘Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-The shrill, of demented choirs of wailing shells’The first stanza ends with the mournful bugle call from their homelands. A bugle is usually played at a military funeral but so many men were lost in the war that they did not receive the proper burial they deserved.The second stanza tells the reader not of the ungodly deaths and ‘burials’ of the soldiers by of the silent suffering of their families.‘What candles may be held to speed them all?Not in the hands of boys but in their eyesShall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.’Tears glimmer in the eyes of those who grieve like candles held by acolytes at a funeral would flicker and glow. The young sweethearts that patiently waited are the funeral cloths for their loved ones lost at war.‘The pallor of girls’ brow shall be the pall;’With the fall of each dust on the soldiers at war, the blinds are drawn. This symbolises the tradition of the drawing of blinds in a room where the coffin of a dead person lies, as a sign to the world and as a mark of respect. The coming of night is like the drawing of the blinds.‘And as each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.’In this poem the reader can feel both the horrors of war in the first stanza and the pity and sympathy for the family in the second stanza.The diction used in the first stanza such as ‘stuttering’, ‘rapid rattle’, ‘shrill’, ‘demented’ and ‘wailing’ are the sounds that the soldiers had to hear in their dying moments. The reader can almost imagine those sounds of war. These words are also examples of cacophony, which are words with harsh and discordant sounds. It is hard not to feel the pain and suffering of t...
