Summary
As morning dawns, a group of dead sailors are washed onto the shore of the Gulf of Arabs. An anonymous person has brought the soldiers up from the shallow waters onto the beach. This person has buried the men in narrow graves and covered them with sand.
Analysis
The poem begins with a juxtaposition. The sailors are arriving at the Gulf of Arabs, which is framed as their purposeful destination. Yet the sailors are in fact “dead,” and are no longer able to purposefully travel. This haunting juxtaposition demonstrates the fruitlessness of war. During war, soldiers travel and fight in organized units, with the goal of invading or defending specific territory, or of accomplishing certain missions. Here, however, the sailors have arrived, but are not on a mission—they are already dead, pointing to the broader devastation caused by wartime efforts. Furthering this juxtaposition, the sailors arrive at their destination “[s]oftly and humbly,” rather than aggressively or stealthily, as one would typically expect when describing soldiers.
These lines also subtly but firmly establish the poem’s anti-war message. The poem points to the wide-scale devastation caused by war by using plurals to suggest that a great number of sailors have died—entire “convoys of dead sailors” wash onto the shore (Line 2). The poem also emphasizes the sailors’ passivity, demonstrating how they have been robbed of their agency, and their very lives, by the war. They have been killed due to the conflict, and even after their death the “morning rolls them in the foam”—here, Slessor uses personification to emphasize the indignity and passivity of the men’s experiences. Slessor also suggests that these men have lost their identities due to their experiences as soldiers. They “sway and wander” in the water, metaphorically reflecting how entire nations can become unmoored from their values in the pursuit of military victories.
While Stanza 1 exposes the bleak reality of war, Stanza 2 points to a moment of dignity and solemnity in this devastation. A person has found time in the midst of conflict to memorialize the dead sailors by burying them in makeshift graves on the beach. Slessor frames this action as a moment of calm during war’s violence and devastation—the person created the graves “[b]etween the sob and clubbing of the gunfire” (Line 4). Mimicking the motion of the waves that have washed up the dead sailors, war can be characterized by peaks (of violence) and troughs (of reflection and mourning). The shallow graves are described as “burrows,” which invokes imagery of foxholes, a type of position consisting of a shallow dip in the ground that troops can use to shelter against enemy fire or as a firing point. The fact that the unknown person has to “bury them in burrows” highlights that the logical conclusion of war is needless death—the men have gone from deliberately burying themselves in foxholes to shoot to being laid to rest in these burrows.
