The Death of a Soldier

Even though war is a defining aspect of a soldier’s death, the poem does not focus on the war itself, and instead grapples with resolving a forgotten death. The speaker does not name the soldier, nor does he describe the fatal event. Instead, death is a looming predator, a breeze that blows across the earth, and the soul and the body blow away in death like the leaves blow away in autumn: “Death is absolute and without memorial, / As in a season of autumn” (Lines 7-8). These lines specifically state that death itself is without memorial; under these circumstances, death is as mundane as falling leaves. Like anything else with value, the more deaths there are, the lesser their significance. Each individual soldier’s death is a drop in the ocean compared to the 20 million deaths that resulted from World War I—but the speaker rebels against this, using irony and cynicism to convey how tragic this attitude towards death truly is.

The speaker is troubled by this feeling of apathy and helplessness against the breeze of death and is primarily concerned about the soldier not having a proper burial. He discusses the matter in an ironic