The Senselessness of Warfare
“Beach Burial” contrasts the efforts of war—to achieve a geopolitical goal, such as acquiring territory or defeating an antagonist—with the anonymity of the dead soldiers and the unfeeling vastness of nature. The poem opens with a juxtaposition that reveals its antiwar views. The “convoys” of soldiers—implying a powerful, organized military force—are arriving ashore, but they arrive “[s]oftly and humbly,” in contrast to the brashness and force of military battle. As the poem progresses, it continues o subvert the reader’s expectations—Slessor replaces a patriotic description of warfare with an elegy for the death of these anonymous sailors. The poem repeatedly emphasizes the sailors’ loss of identity –they are “unknown,” naked, and united by the empty expanse of sand that is their final resting place. This overarching motif of anonymity suggests that war only serves to erode its participants’ individuality.
The poem’s antiwar theme is also enforced through the anonymous mourner’s message. This person writes the inscriptions on the crosses with “perplexity” and “bewildered pity”; by using three words all with similar meaning, Slessor employs repetition to underscore the senselessness of war. The mourner, although presumably being involved in or having witnessed the war in some sense, is unable to emotionally reconcile the needless deaths of these men. Their words also “choke,” symbolizing the mourner’s inability to truly express the trauma of this moment. In sum, the poem sharply contrasts with the genre of propaganda: works that are often sponsored by the government and seek to romanticize or celebrate the war effort. Instead of vindicating the war, the poem focuses on the death, destruction, and anonymity that warfare produces.
Grief
In addition to specifically discussing war, “Beach Burial” more broadly explores the theme of grief. Grief operates at multiple levels in the poem. First, the unknown mourner seems to experience grief over the sailors’ death. Their words “choke” with the pain of mourning and they experience “perplexity” and pity,” despite not knowing who the soldiers were. The mourner shows the scope of war’s destruction. Even those not aligned with the specific soldiers in battle are impacted by the broader effects of death and suffering caused by war. Similarly, the poem’s narrator seems somber and moved by the devastating scene that he describes. Like the mourner, the narrator does not know the identity of the drowned sailors, but is nevertheless devastated by their needless deaths. The poem thus encourages the reader to join with the two central characters in reflecting on the pain and grief produced by warfare.
Slessor also uses the tool of personification to underscore the theme of grief produced by war, by depicting the setting and inanimate objects within the poem as themselves mourning. The gunfire“sob[s],” intertwining the theme of grief with the description of active battle. This metaphor suggests that the gun itself is horrified at the violence it inflicts, which creates a striking antiwar message. The words on the cross are also personified—they “choke as they begin,” calling to mind a mourner who is struggling to speak through their emotions. The “ghostly” pencil reinforces this overarching sense of loss and grief, as the very instrument that the mourner uses to write is itself erased from the poem. Together, the characters’ sense of mourning and the personification establish grief as a central focus of the poem.
Finality of Death
As its title suggests, “Beach Burial” examines death and ultimately suggests that death is the greatest unifier of humanity. The men, although potentially being enemies while in warfare, are depicted as united together in death. They are only described in the collective plural: “they sway and wander,” the sand covers “their nakedness.” This description emphasizes the finality of death; the men are permanently lost to the state of death, which transforms them from individual human beings into identical corpses. Similarly, the circumstances of their death lead them to be treated as a collective; despite their various purposes or identities on earth, they are now described as having “gone in search of the same landfall,” again becoming united in the finality of death.
Notably, nature is what binds these men together as a unit—specifically, the “sand joins them together.” This personification aligns nature with death, both of which are contrasted with the artificial divisions created by manmade war. Slessor suggests that in the natural state of the world, humanity is bound together by its universal experience of nature and of death. At its conclusion, the poem closely links war with death, emphasizing how the inevitable result of war is needless loss of life. The men, once active in battle, have now been “[e]nlisted on the other front” (Line 20). This metaphor (or euphemism, which is an indirect expression to avoid referring directly to something unpleasant, such as the phrase “passed on” as a substitute for “death”), ironically calls attention to the uselessness and devastation caused by the men’s enlistment in armies while alive. Their “enlistment” in the military has directly resulted in their “enlistment” into the afterlife.
