Dead Man's Dump

"Dead Man's Dump" is a very graphic poetic description of its subject. Focus on how the speaker makes us see, hear, and almost feel what the poem describes.

“Dead Man’s Dump” sure paints a picture. A cart is carrying barbed wire and is rolling over dead bodies, “The wheels lurched over sprawled dead//But pained them not, though their bones crunched”. The fighting continues and the bodies of both sides mix together in death as it unifies them all as human as opposed to fighting forces, “They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,//Man born to man, and born to woman”. The speaker feels that in death, these men’s bodies have returned to the earth, “Now she has them at last!” but possibly not their souls, “Earth! Have they gone into you?” Rosenburg creates some interesting metaphors here, like when he speaks of the dead men getting shot, the speaker says, “When the swift iron burning bee//Drained the wild honey of their youth.” I found this metaphor perfect in how it contrasts the image of war, making it more like nature.

The speaker asks, “What of us?” the men who live and suggests they feel immortal for having lived when others have died, but that there is still a great fear within them that they will join their friends and enemies. Then the speaker goes on to describe the fighting, the metaphors are appropriate and work beautifully to show the harshness of war, “The air is loud with death” I found especially excellent with how simple it was to start off this stanza. What did he mean by death? Not just those dying men receiving their final wounds, but the explosions he goes into detail about further down and the gunshots exchanged between each side. Then the speaker describes seeing a stretcher-bearer taking a body to the load of others. When the man looks back at his dropped load, “The drowning soul was sunk too deep//For human tenderness.” The body was already too dead to warrant sympathy.

Good reading of how this poem presents the horrors of war and fear on the parts of the soldiers.
On the last part of your first paragraph, do you think that, by making death in war seem more natural, the speaker here is diminishing the horror? Why or why not?
You really NEED to see the last two stanzas of this--the closing image/experience.
Might also compare this take on the horrors of war to Owen's in "Dulce."