Through these Pale Cold Days
The first line of the poem opens with the description of ‘’pale cold days’’ which is lightened only by the burning faces of the people who are fighting in the war. This is a suggestion made to point out the destruction many felt during the war and how the war affected the lives of the men fighting in it.
The narrator then describes the eyes of the soldiers, hidden beneath their brows. The eyes still hold a spark of life thus hinting that hope was not entirely lost and the world could still be saved. Their eyes become the central point of the poem from that stanza one, being described as the way through which the soldiers see the future while at the same time the way through which they perceive death and the suffering taking place all around them.
The Jew
The poem consists of only two stanzas and it is told from the perspective of a first person narrator who claims to have come from the loins of Moses. This is an allusion made towards the way in which Moses influenced the religion and how he is seen as one of the most important religious figures for Jews.
Also in the first stanza, the narrator mentions the Ten Commandments Moses received from God and the commandments which he later gave to the Israelites. The Ten Commandments are compared with the moon, the narrator wanting to transmit through this the idea that those laws are universal and will never be changed. By comparison, the men to whom the laws were given are like lamps, easy to move from one place to another.
In the second and last stanza of the poem, the narrator compares once more the laws with the moon and adds that those laws were written in blood, an allusion most likely made to the bloodshed suffered in the modern times and not only by the Jewish community which was more than often persecuted for their beliefs.
A Worm Fed on the Heart of Corinth
The poem consists of only ten lines and it begins with the narrator mentioning three nations, Corinth, Babylon and Rome, all described here as serving as food for a worm. Both the nations and the worm are used here as symbols with a deep religious meaning. The worm is used as a symbol for degradation or a symbol for the sinful inclinations which exist in every person on this planet. The three nations mentioned here also appear often in the Bible as representing places in which decency and morals no longer exist. Thus, the narrator may want to transmit through this the idea that the places mentioned have the power to influence other nations as well and make them behave in an unnatural way.
The worm is seen as being the cause for every sinful action a person may have done at one point in their life and the narrator offers as an example the tale of Paris Helen and the way in which Paris Raped Helena. The narrator argues that Paris is not to be blamed in this situation but rather that his actions were the result of the worm finding its way into the man’s heart. This worm eventually caused the lust felt Paris which lead him to commit a grave sin.
August 1914
The main theme is this poem is once more, the way in which war can affect as person. In the first stanza, the war is compared with a fire, which can destroy everything in its path. The first stanza ends with two questions, the narrator hypnotizing that the war may simply destroy what we have in excess and then leave everything else untouched.
The second stanza describes life as being the result of a unique combination of honey, gold and iron. the first elements to disappear when the war started was the honey and the gold, or rather the food which everybody needed to survive and the other luxuries the population had access to. Everything that remind was iron, the population finding themselves forced to learn how to live just off iron. The iron is also used here as a symbolic element, being used to make reference to the machines which were built for war and the destruction they had caused as a result.
The iron is described in the last stanza of the poem as being "hard and cold’’ and as having the power to destroy a once beautiful smile. This last line may be a reference made by the narrator towards the way in which war has the power to destroy everything that is good and which has the power to bring happiness in a person’s life.
