The Bullet Wound
The poem contains, in a lyrical format, a very clinical description of a bullet wound. The narrator describes the individual parts of the body the bullet injures on its mission to kill the individual. The description is so vivid that the audience feels compelled to imagine the pain of each individual injury, including the ripping of skin and muscle, the shattering of the clavicle and the rupturing of the main blood vessel, the aorta. In this built connection to the audience, the event of the bullet ripping into the body can be seen as an allegory on the broader atrocities of modern warfare. As the bullet rips into the body of the individual soldier, so does war rip into society, destroys families and brings endless pain and suffering in many different ways. This picture is enhanced through the final line of the poem, where the narrator states that the world always ends like this. The end of the world, literally interpreted the end of the world of this individual, but in a broader light the end of the civilized world. War time poetry often contains an allegory to the broader impact of war, but rarely is it done so vividly and descriptively.
The Bullet
The titular bullet can be seen as a symbol for all the negativity that led to the war. The personified bullet in the poem is willful in its destruction, malicious in its intent. This can be seen as a symbol for those forces behind the war that pull the threads, that make the war happen. These are at first the political interests that start the conflict. Furthermore, a bullet is a product of modern industry, an industrial sector that earn billions with the production of war machinery. The choice to use a personified bullet with malicious intent symbolizes these background issues that make war profitable for some, but deadly and painful for many. Conclusively, a single bullet does not care for what reason it kills a person, it just kills.
Gun/Voice
The second part of the poem contains several linguistic connections between the gun and the human body. The hissing sound of the bullet is described as a word, the oesophagus is likened to the barrel of a gun, the tongues flickering to the explosiveness of a shot fired. These connections can be symbolic for the usage of humans as tools in a war, like weapons are tools. In another sense, as these terms all reflect the usage of voice, the narrator chooses to hint at the power of words. At first, the mental power of the soldier, whose voice is stronger than the bullet. But in a bigger sense, the power of the voice of humans in general, whose words can be weapons, can cause a situation like this in which a bullet has the opportunity to end a soldier's life.
