Summary
The poem begins with a quote from the poet Siegfried Sassoon. It refers to war as a "joke," and is drawn from his poem "A Letter Home." That poem's speaker asserts that the raging war is just a joke, while dreams of peace at home are in a sense more real. Then, the poem itself begins. The first-person speaker explains that he and other soldiers treat Death as a companion. They eat together, and are patient when Death spills food. They're also familiar with the smell of his breath, and accept it even though it's terrible.
Analysis
This poem eagerly adopts and subverts the cliche of wartime camaraderie, describing Death himself as a fellow soldier. Rather than merely personifying Death as a friend, Owen carefully surrounds him with recognizable images of wartime, especially the mealtime mess-tin, and uses the first-person plural to paint him unmistakeably as a member of an intimate group of soldiers. With riddle-like phrases, Owen draws literal parallels between the friendliness and everyday companionship of soldiers and the physical inescapability of death. For instance, he describes the smell of Death's breath—a nod to the smell of decomposing bodies as well as to the closeness of soldiers familiar with each others' every smell—and the way Death spills food, suggesting the image of a person killed mid-meal. By situating Death as a close companion of the soldiers, Owen undermines the idea that military friendliness compensates for or negates the brutality of war. Instead, he suggests, the closeness that soldiers feel for one another is inextricable from their dalliance with death.
The poem's language is informal, using short, simple words and lots of contractions. This reinforces the impression of intimacy and youthful affinity among the soldiers and Death: the personified Death is treated with the same everyday vocabulary that someone might use to describe or converse with a friend, rather than with stylized or ceremonial-sounding language. Meanwhile, a similarly informal—though traditional—rhyme scheme and meter are being established here. These lines are written in iambic pentameter, meaning that they can be subdivided into five sets containing two syllables each with the emphasis on the second of those two syllables. In total, they contain ten syllables each. This ten-syllable rhythm feels easy and natural for English speakers, and echoes the way many people speak themselves. Therefore, though it creates a driving, unbroken rhythm, that rhythm doesn't alter the informal or intimate mood of the poem.
We also see the beginning of a rhyme scheme emerge in these first lines. The first line and the fourth rhyme, concluding with the words "Death" and "breath." So do the second and third, which end with the words "bland" and "hand." Therefore, even though the stanza continues after the fourth line, the ABBA rhyme scheme wraps the first four lines up into a unit of their own. We can expect the next rhymed set of lines to feel subtly different or express somewhat different ideas, despite occupying the same stanza.
