Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us…
The opening line of the puts the reader right into the setting of with imagery that brings to vivid life the conditions of extreme weather. Immediately, it becomes clear that is not going to be a war poem in which the soldiers on the other side are the enemy. The enemy here is nature and it is personified from the start with the language of violence. This is World War I where images of the fighting men are dominated by rifles with bayonets attached, but the imagery here is as if the frigid cold is equipped with a bayonet.
But nothing happens.
Fully half of the poem’s eight stanzas end with these same words. It is profoundly ironic that in the midst of war on the front lines, there are moments when the greatest enemy is that nothing happens. The speaker paints a vivid portrait of philosophical proposition that hell is eternally waiting for something to happen. Boredom in the everyday life is enough to drive some people to the point of madness. What if the sinister power of boredom is compounded by the kind of cold that makes your brain ache combined with the realization that the boredom at any moment could come to a sudden end with a barrage of bullets? Then add to that nagging the intensifying itch at your conscience that none of this matters because the world will just go back to the way it was before war broke out just like it always does.
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,
Deep into grassier ditches.
The poem reveals a masterful manipulation of language to convey the multiple themes of physical misery, psychological torture and a growing sense of the futility of it. This particular quote is especially efficient because it seems to capture the whole thematic expanse in one highly detailed sentence. What is now more familiarly known as a foxhole takes on an entirely different sort of connotation when described merely as a hole and the cringing seems to describe not just the expressions within it, but the physical act of entering. “Forgotten dreams” could refer equally to those ambitions left behind before war hurtled them into the trenches and to being the dreams forgotten by those back home. The “grassier ditches” bring to mind both a longing to back home in better places as well as the melancholic anger fueling envy of those lucky men enjoying that greener grass back home, safe and warm and far away from the multitudes of misery.
