Writing (Motif)
One of the poem's central motifs is the act of writing. In the opening section, the speaker expresses his desire to put all of the details of his life on paper. As the sequence progresses, he finds himself gradually feeling more and more alienated and disturbed by the things he encounters: careless superiors, starving enlistees, and bodies left on the battlefield. The disillusionment and horror he experiences in seeing these things only strengthens his resolve to keep writing. At the poem's conclusion, he notes how easily people forget the stories of these Black soldiers who sacrificed their lives thanklessly. For this reason, he returns to the same motif about the importance of writing at the poem's conclusion, as it allows him to bear witness to these atrocities and record them. Even if he cannot protect himself and these men, he can at least pass on their stories along with his own.
Corpses (Symbol)
The speaker repeatedly refers to gruesome images of rotting corpses. Death is one of the most common events in his daily work at the fort, as he buries bodies and distributes their rations. He is deeply haunted by these images, particularly when he hears that a group of Black soldiers' bodies have been left, unburied and unclaimed, on the battlefield at Port Hudson. He describes these scenes in visceral detail, including descriptions of rot and decay. In the text, corpses symbolize the aftermath of war. As colonels and generals flippantly dismiss the loss of Black lives, their corpses appear, to the speaker, to represent what these men have laid down for a cause that does not care for or value them. In the particular instance of the soldiers who were unclaimed, the speaker believes they literalize the waste of human life, as they were not even afforded the basic dignity of a burial. His inability to forget the appearance of these dead bodies also underscores his trauma and resolve to carry on their narratives with his.
Letters (Symbol)
In "March 1863," the speaker depicts himself helping Confederate prisoners with the composition of letters they are sending to their families. As many of them cannot read or write, he takes their dictation. During this process, he describes the way in which they labor over their sentences, filled with sentiments that they cannot properly find the means to express. In this section he comments that there is a gap between the feeling they are trying to convey and the way it comes out in their correspondence. In this moment, these letters symbolize the space between emotion and the written word. A soldier who misses his wife tells her he remembers her exactly as she appeared when he left. Another asks after their food storage, wondering what has happened to their land. These letters represent the difficulty of expression and the limitations presented by the act of writing. At the same time, the speaker's understanding of language is also highlighted here, as he is able to intuit (and write in the sonnet) what these individuals are actually trying to say.
