Essay Questions

What is going on at the beginning of the poem?

World War I is on the verge of exploding into reality as the British navy is making preparations by conducting artillery drills off the coast of England and the sound being made is loud enough to literally wake the dead. The poem is narrated by a corpse brought back to the waking world as a result of all the commotion and is moved to wonder if Judgment Day has finally arrived. Imagery paints the portrait of the robust quality of such a commotion; one so intense as to literally wake the dead. Like cartoon characters having a nightmare, the buried bodies of the dead snap bolt upright while hounds begin to howl and mice are so shocked they drop their precious bits of food.

How do the dead receive word that Judgment Day is not yet at hand?

No less an authority on the issue of the arrival dead of Judgment Day than God delivers the ironically soothing news. He explains that all the boisterous hullabaloo is nothing more to fear and dread than gunships conducting artillery practice in the English Channel. Far from the singularity of Judgement Day, what is actually going on is business as usual. In fact, God even takes on a slightly snarky attitude in His attempt to salve the savage fears of the departed by explaining that “The world is as it used to be.” This proves of little comfort to even those already dead and gone.

What is the significance of the imagery in the poem’s final two lines?

The poem concludes on a note of inevitability in the face of tensions across Europe threatening yet another outbreak of war. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was still just a little over a month away when the poem was first published, but that would prove to be merely the explosion at the end of a long wick which had been burning for months. Actual war had not yet reached England, but European history would make its ultimate arrival anything but surprising. The imagery of weapons of war preparing for engagement in “Stourton Tower, / And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge” encompasses allusions to monuments to actual heroes, myth, and the pre-historical unknown. The references are direct commentary on God’s previous snark: the world is as it ever was and will always be so. War is hell, but humans haven’t ever been able to stop themselves from wanting to go there.