Speaker
The speaker appears to be a detached observer of the horrific scene. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker appears omniscient; they describe the dead bodies and provide the reader with context about the poem’s setting. However, as the poem progresses, the reader sees that the speaker’s point of view is more limited—they are unsure of who created the graves memorializing the sailors, and they are even unsure of which side the sailors fought for. The only suggestion regarding the speaker’s identity is made in the final stanza, when the speaker notes that it is unclear whether the soldiers “fought with us.” The word “us” aligns the speaker with one of the sides in the war. Given the literary and historical context in which Slessor wrote, the reader could further assume that the speaker is aligned with the Australian soldiers who perished during their assault on Egypt.
The Dead Sailors
The dead sailors are the force driving the narrative of the poem. They are the victims of an unidentified battle taking place in the North African theater of World War II. The reader is deliberately given sparse details about the sailors; the speaker is not even certain of which side they fought for. As the makeshift graves state, these characters are purely unknown. Thus, these characters are central to the poem's critique of war, by demonstrating how warfare renders them dead, anonymous, and robbed of their identities.
Someone
The poem describes an unspecified “[s]omeone” who is no longer physically present in the time of the poem, but took time in between battles to bury the dead sailors on the beach and mark their resting place with driftwood crosses. It is implied that this person, like the speaker, is not sure whether the sailors actually shared his allegiance in the war, since they mark the graves with the phrase “Unknown seaman.” Yet this person took time and possibly risked their own safety to give some modicum of dignity to the sailors. “Someone” is displaying humanity in the midst of the inhumanity of war.
Nevertheless, the poem also applies its generally bleak tone to its only ‘hero.’ Despite the anonymous person’s efforts to commemorate the sailors, the inscription that they scrawled onto the driftwood is already being washed away by the rain. This unknown person demonstrates the impossibility of maintaining dignity or even humanity in the midst of warfare, even when characters attempt to act morally.
