Summary
Having mentioned the stench of Death's breath, the speaker notes that he and his fellow soldiers cry in the face of the smell—but their courage is unaffected. Death, meanwhile, commits a whole range of offenses against his companions. He spits bullets at them and coughs shrapnel in their direction. The soldiers are unfazed: they sing and whistle when he flies over them or cuts them with his scythe.
Analysis
Here, the violent, dangerous results of living so close to death become increasingly obvious. Whereas the poem's initial lines focused on byproducts of Death (like its smell), these lines focus on the sudden ways in which people can die—getting struck by a bullet or attacked with a bomb. Yet Death, still, doesn't necessarily appear villainous. For one thing, Death's actions aren't described through violent-sounding verbs. Instead, Death brings harm through everyday habits: spitting, coughing, and shaving. This implies that, while Death kills, Death itself is nothing to be feared. He's almost hapless, causing harm through clumsiness—after all, this is Death, and he's therefore destructive without effort. The question then becomes: who is to blame? Or, more precisely, who has enabled Death to live so closely with people, when Death inevitably brings destruction?
These four lines hew almost exactly to the pattern established in the previous four. They are also written in iambic pentameter, and they follow a CDDC rhyme scheme, echoing the already-established ABBA rhyme scheme. This consistency creates a sense of inevitability, so that the poem mimics its speaker's fatalistic stoicism. However, it contains one moment of notable divergence. While every single line in the poem so far has been end-stopped (meaning that it concludes with a punctuation mark and the end of a phrase), the poem's sixth line is enjambed. An enjambed line ends in the middle of a phrase, creating a feeling of disruption and abruptness. By breaking the phrase "he's coughed/Shrapnel" into two lines, Owen highlights the fundamental irony of the poem—namely, that while death is so ever-present that its every cough is familiar to the speaker, it nevertheless creates disruption and harm. The fact that it can disrupt the established structure of the poem by introducing enjambment serves as a kind of proof that, regardless of the speaker's explicit acceptance of death, he is not fully inured. He recovers quickly, returning to end-stopped lines, but the momentary disruption reveals his deeper feelings.
