Channel Firing Literary Elements

The poem features multiple speakers and points of view. Some of the characters are corpses awakened from the dead. God is another speaker.

Ballad form composed in iambic tetrameter.

The warmongering nations of the world are described as still being hard at work trying to increase the human cost of nationalist aggression through both metaphor and simile in just one line as they characterized in their attempt to “Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters”

The motivating event of the poem—the sound loud enough to literally wake the dead—has attention drawn to its significance in the opening line: “That night your great guns”

The most ironic element about the poem may be that the sound which was terrible enough to wake the dead is merely gunnery practice by one part of the navy of one country. Publication of the poem preceded the outbreak of the much louder World War I by mere months.

Anti-war poetry.

A graveyard on the British coastland not far from the English Channel.

Satirically irreverent

Protagonist: An offbeat but essentially benevolent God. Antagonist: Warmongering leaders of aggressive countries.

The conflict is between the dead who have been awakened by the noise of artillery practice under the impression that Judgment Day has finally arrived and God who intervenes to explain the truth.

Although humorous for the most part, the poem comes to a climax on a very serious note with imagery that preparations for war are taking place not outside British borders in the neutral territory of the English Channel, but within its borders.

Having been published just a few months before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the entire narrative foreshadows the imminent outbreak of hostilities of World War One.

“The mouse let fall the altar-crumb” is an understatement metaphor for how the outbreak of reaches far past the soldier on the battlefield to impact the least likely of victims in some small way.

The final lines are an allusion to the entirety of the history and mythology of British history as participatory elements in the never-ending cycle of endless wars with its references to Stourton Tower, Camelot and Stonehenge.

“Guns” is used as a metonym to represent the comprehensive list of war weaponry in both the first and last stanza.

The dead speakers are explicitly characterized as being mere skeletons yet are endowed with all the power of speech associated with fully attached human anatomy. Thus, they are not persons in the literal sense and represent an unusual example of personification.

The idea that mere artillery practice by ships in the English Channel would be loud enough that it actually “Shook all our coffins as we lay” seems to be a bit of hyperbolic overstatement.

God’s sardonic laughter at his own joke about the climate accompany judgment day is written out to become an example of this device: “Ha, ha.”