A third-person speaker describes a horrific scene in a curiously detached way. The bodies of dead sailors are floating into the Gulf of Arabs (which is situated off the Egyptian coast). In the dark of night, the bodies were submerged and thrown about in currents under the water, but they begin rolling to shore with the waves in the early morning.
Some unidentified stranger has found enough time and courage between battles to pull the bodies from the shallows and bury them in rows further up the beach. While these are small, makeshift graves—mere “burrows”—they cover the naked soldiers from continued exposure to the elements and give them dignity.
Indeed, the burials are as proper and respectful as the stranger can make them. The gravesites are marked with crosses made from whatever driftwood has washed up nearby. These crosses bear the metaphorical final signature of each sailor and are marked by the inscription, “unknown seaman.” The narrator describes the stranger’s words as perplexed and bewildered, the words themselves seeming to choke with emotion.
Due to the humid environment, these inscriptions are already fading and dripping down the tidewood crosses; the barely detectable writing has mingled with the wood to turn purple in a way that resembles the lips of the men turning blue in death.
The poem comes to an end with a reckoning on the futility of war. Each of these dead seamen was lost during the same engagement made at the same landfall. But in the state in which the sea deposited their bodies upon the beach for burial, it is impossible to know whether they fought as enemies or as brothers-in-arms. And, of course, at this point such lingering questions no longer matter: they all belong to the same sand now, and all are “enlisted” in the afterlife.
