Summary
In the last three stanzas, the speaker describes makeshift crosses fashioned from wood that has drifted onto the beach’s shores. An unknown person has inscribed the crosses with the commemoration “Unknown seaman.” Due to the humid climate, the inscription is beginning to fade and drip down the crosses, the ink turning from purple to blue. The speaker mourns the loss of the dead seamen, although he is unsure if they were his allies or enemies. Regardless of which side they fought on, the dead men are now united in the sand and have moved on to the afterlife.
Analysis
These stanzas are marked by the absence of human activity and the dominance of nature over mankind. Through an emphasis on objects and landscape, the stanzas erase the agency not only of the dead men, but of the speaker and the unknown person who commemorated the sailors. While someone must have written the words ‘Unknown seaman’ on the tidewood posts, the poem does not reveal who that person is and does not even describe their actions. Instead, the poem uses passive voice and personification to depict the memorials. “Each cross…bears the last signature of men”; the “words choke”; the “ghostly pencil / wavers and fades” (Lines 9-10, 12 13-14). Each of these phrases uses a verb that emphasizes action and implies a human actor—“bears,” choke,” and “wavers”—but all traces of humanity are wiped from the poem, leaving behind only haunted objects that seem to move of their own accord, like the “ghostly pencil.” This use of personification reinforces the haunting tone of the poem. Similarly, the word choice “bear” here subtly reinforces the tone of mourning—just as the speaker must ‘bear’ the burden of witnessing this devastation, the cross is forced to ‘bear’ the signature marking the men’s death. The crosses also suggest that the person making the graves may have been Australian or British, as these nations are predominantly Christian, as opposed to the defending Egyptian soldiers, who are more likely to be Muslim.
The poem also uses personification to reinforce the theme of war’s hopelessness. Due to the wet climate, the inscriptions commemorating and memorializing the sailors’ death are already beginning to fade: “The breath of the wet season has washed” the inscriptions from the post, with the purple ink “drip[ping]” down the post (Line 15, 14). This image, like the preceding image of the endless, dark ocean churning the corpses of the drowned soldiers, hauntingly invokes nature’s power over humanity. It suggests that human efforts like warfare are insignificant in the face of the long scope of human history, leading instead only to human suffering like the painful deaths of these sailors. This theme is further supported by Line 19, which states that the “sand joins [the sailors] together.” Despite their identity as soldiers fighting for a specific nation, upon death the sailors are only bound by their shared connection to nature. Thus, nature serves as a lens through which the speaker sees the absurdity of man’s historical desire for warfare.
Finally, these stanzas consistently use end-stops as opposed to enjambment; most of the lines end with a comma or period rather than continuing seamlessly onto the next line. The end-stops create natural dramatic pauses in the poem’s rhythm. Just as the men are isolated in death, each line is unmoored from the next, creating a sense of isolation within the poem’s very structure. This structure also reinforces the poem’s elegiac tone. Like a funeral rite, the poem consists of lines that are separated and repeated, as if intoned at a funeral service. Line 11 exemplifies the repetition in these stanzas—the words on the crosses are “Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity” (Line 11). This prayer-like repetition supports the poem’s overall tone of grief and solemnity.
