Analysis of Beach Burial

The first 200 words of this essay...

Beach Burial (Kenneth Slessor)- Analysis

Softly and Humbly to the Gulf of Arabs,

The convoys of dead sailors come;

At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,

But morning rolls them in the foam.

Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire Someone,

it seems, has time for this,

To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows

And tread the sand upon their nakedness;

And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,

Bears the last signature of men,Written with such perplexity,

with such bewildered pity,The words choke as they begin -"Unknown seaman" - the ghostly pencil Wavers and fades, the purple drips,

The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions

As blue as drowned men's lips,Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,Whether as enemies they fought,Or fought with us, or neither

; the sand joins them together,Enlisted on the other front.

Although not blatantly obvious at first, Kenneth Slessor's emotive and poignant poem Beach burial is a poem concerned with raising the awareness of national identity. Now I found this hard to believe at first