Wirers

The poem is written in alexandrines: a verse line consisting of six iambic feet, or 12 syllables. An iamb is a poetic foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. An alexandrine is also known as an iambic hexameter. Line 2 is a good example of an alexandrine: “And yawning sentries mumble, ‘Wirers going out,’” as is Line 11, “Young Hughes was badly hit; I heard him carried away.” Both these lines also contain a pause, called a caesura, in the middle of the line. This is a characteristic feature of the Alexandrine line. The caesura can be any form of punctuation, such as a comma, colon, period, or dash. In this poem, all but two of the alexandrine lines (Lines 4 and 13) contain caesuras.

For the sake of variety and to avoid monotony, the poet occasionally varies the meter. In Line 5, “Black forms,” the phrase that follows the caesura, is not an iamb but a spondee, in which both syllables are stressed. The following line, Line 6, begins with a spondee, “Stock-still,” as does Line 7, “Stride hither” (first two syllables) and Line 10, “Gleams desolate” and “night's misery” (in both examples, the first two syllables form a spondee). In Line 3, “twisting” is another variation; this time, a trochee: the opposite of an iamb, a trochee consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. In the same line, “hammering” (first two syllables) is also a trochee.

The alexandrine pattern is disrupted in Lines 8 and 9. If those two shorter lines had been presented as one, they would have formed an alexandrine. The poet, however, sought a different effect--one to match the disruptive implication of the words “snags and tangles” referring to the barbed wire. Thus, the form of the poem at this point echoes the meaning.

The length of the stanzas varies. Although no working drafts exist for this poem, it seems likely that Sassoon first envisioned the poem as consisting of three quatrains (four-line verses), in the form of alexandrines. Thus Stanza 1 consists of four lines. Stanza 2, however, has six lines. This is because the poet has in effect split up one alexandrine to form an “extra” line (Lines 8 and 9). Sassoon then takes the first line of what otherwise would have been the first line of the final stanza and tacks it on to Stanza 2. This creates the sixth line for Stanza 2 but leaves Stanza 3 one line “short,” since it consists of only three lines. The lack of uniformity in the length of the stanzas, like the splitting up of the alexandrine line into two in Lines 8 and 9, is a way of reflecting the chaos, discordance, and unpredictability of the war zone that is the subject of the poem.