“Beach Burial” is a powerfully bleak poem that takes an unflinching look at war, portraying it as wasteful, senseless, and tragic. Inspired by a World War Two battle that took place in Egypt, the poem focuses on beach burials—soldiers killed at sea who wash to shore and are laid to rest in the sand. The poem highlights the anonymity of these burials (the graves are marked only as “unknown seaman”), presenting death as the great leveler that makes all people equal—whichever side of the war they fought on, whether they were even soldiers in the first place. Through contemplating these makeshift burial sites, the poem undermines the idea of war as a noble or heroic activity. The poem opens with a paradox, describing the “dead sailors” who arrive …show more content…
In other words, nothing can truly pay tribute to these men—like the inscriptions, the memory of them and their sacrifice is destined to fade over time. But the poem does more than just highlight the tragic loss of life in war. The poem describes the washed-up men as being strangely united in death: “Whether as enemies they fought / Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together.” In death, the things that made these soldiers comrades or enemies wash away, and they all are once more part of the wider human family. Their anonymity has eroded their identity, but it has also eroded their wartime allegiances to one side or the other. Indeed, in the little phrase “or neither” the poem acknowledges that some of these men may not even have been soldiers at all! Nonetheless, all of these young men have “enlisted on the other front”: they have joined whatever it is (if anything) that comes after death. The poem thus also highlights the absurdity of war, by showing that in death, when it is already too late, the allegiances and arguments that drive war cease to matter. All in all, then, “Beach Burial” is a bleak poem that has nothing good to say about