Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
The unidentified speaker follows the progress of a soldier making his way through an underground tunnel.
Form and Meter
The poem is composed of four stanzas of different lengths written mostly in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is ABB CDCD ABBACDCDFFG ABAABBC.
Metaphors and Similes
Metaphors
-"Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair" (Line 20): The light of dawn is compared to a ghost.
-"Unloading hell behind him step by step" (Line 25): Leaving the tunnel is compared to leaving hell.
Alliteration and Assonance
Alliteration
-"prying torch with patching glare" (Line 2): The /p/ repeats.
-"A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed" (Line 5): The /m/ repeats.
-"Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug" (Line 9): The /h/ repeats.
-"And stooped to give the sleeper’s arm a tug" (Line 10): The /s/ repeats.
-"Get up and guide me" (Line 13): The /g/ repeats.
-"Savage, he kicked a soft" (Line 14): The /s/ repeats.
-"fists of fingers" (Line 18): The /f/ repeats.
Assonance
-"He winked his prying torch" (Line 2): The "in" sound repeats.
Irony
The soldier romanticizes the world above and prefers it to the darkness of the tunnel, but the battle being waged above has its own horrors.
Genre
War Poetry
Setting
An underground tunnel specified to be part of the Hindenburg Line.
Tone
Eerie, Gruesome, Disorientating
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist is the soldier making his way through the tunnel. The antagonist is the terrible context that placed him in this situation: the war.
Major Conflict
The major conflict of this poem is whether or not the soldier will make it out of the tunnel alive. His sleep-deprivation and the darkness of the tunnel increase the poem's tension.
Climax
The climax occurs when the soldier encounters what he assumes to be a sleeping figure, but is actually the corpse of a man who suffered a hard death ten days previously.
Foreshadowing
N/A
Understatement
The air is described as "unwholesome," which may be an understatement for this dank tunnel in which corpses decompose.
Allusions
The details about the body the soldier finds allude to the terrors of the war. This soldier stands in for all the others who died.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
The term "fists of fingers" evokes many parts of a whole and could refer to the sheer amount of soldiers who died as a result of the war (Line 18). This is an example of synecdoche.
Personification
N/A
Hyperbole
N/A
Onomatopoeia
N/A
