The Full Text of “Beach Burial”
The Full Text of “Beach Burial”
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“Beach Burial” Introduction
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"Beach Burial" is a poem by Australian war poet, correspondent, and journalist Kenneth Slessor. The poem focuses on burial sites along the coast of Egypt (specifically, the Arab Gulf near the port city of Alexandria). Elegiac in tone, the poem laments the tragic loss of life that comes with war, and reflects on the anonymity of the dead men buried in the sand. It makes the point that it's impossible to tell which side of the war the dead men fought for in the first place. Slessor spent time reporting from Egypt during World War Two, so the poem may be based on personal experience.
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“Beach Burial” Summary
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The bodies of dead sailors gently float in groups to the shore of the Gulf of Arabs. In the night, their bodies are moved by the tides in the depths of the water; by morning, they wash up with the foam onto the beach.
It appears that somebody has time, between tears and avoiding live gunfire, to bury these men. Whoever it is pulls the men from the waves and buries them on the beach, gently patting the sand down over their naked bodies.
The graves are marked with crosses made of driftwood. There is writing on these crosses—written in mournful confusion—and the words themselves seem too sad to go on.
Each cross says "unknown seaman." The pencil markings grow fainter and then disappear, and purple drips down the wood. The damp atmosphere has turned the writing as blue as the lips of a drowned man.
These dead seamen, who all were in search of the same land, could have been enemies or allies—perhaps not even soldiers at all. Their place in the sand unites them, as does being dead.
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“Beach Burial” Themes
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War and Death
“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 on the shore as a convoy. This description is ironic, in that it paints these dead soldiers as if they were still living, as if they were coming into shore in military formation. The description places the heroic image of soldiers coming to fight in a kind of overlay with the eerie devastation of soldiers who have been killed, forcing these two understandings of war into an uneasy coexistence. Then in lines 3 and 4 the poem tips the scales, throwing off any idea of the heroic as it offers a grim depiction of the lifelessness of these bodies—the way that they are at the mercy of the ocean and its tides. From the beginning, then, the poem establishes an atmosphere of death and hopelessness, of war not as a means to glory but a path to anonymous death.
The poem then turns its attention to the burial sites that line the beach. Generally speaking, the act of burial is about mourning and honoring the person who has died. But these burials are utterly different. They are improvised, done in a hurry, and, most importantly, they are anonymous. The brutality of war means that these men have become untethered—like ships cut loose from their moorings—from who they actually are. The anonymous “someone” (line 6) who buries the men wishes to commemorate them, but can only go so far. Both the person doing the burying and the dead themselves are unknown, and will be forever.
The speaker examines these burial sites closely, which intensifies the sense of tragic anonymity. The crosses are not well-made, but just “tidewood”—wood that has drifted into shore just as the dead bodies have. The inscriptions on the crosses—which just say “Unknown seaman”—are fading away (“the purple drips”). 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 war. It doesn’t portray anyone as heroic, nor does it seek to show how the men’s sacrifices were somehow worth it. Though Slessor was inspired to write the poem after the actual Word War Two Battle of El Alamein, the poem leaves out any context about why or for what the soldiers fought, indicating that it's likely intended to highlight the foolish destructiveness of all war, not just World War Two.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-20
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Beach Burial”
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Lines 1-2
Softly and humbly ...
... dead sailors come;The poem spares no punches with its opening image. The funereal tone is established immediately, focusing on "convoys of dead sailors" who are destined for the Gulf of Arabs (a bay on the coast of Egypt). This is an unsettling paradox because it sounds as if the sailors head to this destination on purpose—when, in fact, they're already dead. "Convoys" is a word chosen specifically for its military connotations; a convoy is a group of ships traveling together, usually under military protection (or formed of military vessels itself). Even in the first two lines, then, the poem has already gestured towards the tragic waste of young life in war.
It's important, too, that the sailors arrive "softly and humbly." The notion of humility contrasts with the bombastic patriotism to which the organizers of war often appeal (indeed, war poetry can usually be categorized into works that either support or undermine this effort). Soldiers are usually thought to be proud, not humble, but it's already clear that these soldiers are very different from that ideal. However, the men's humility is not their choice—rather, they're forced to be humble simply because they're dead. Furthermore, they're anonymous, disfigured first by war and then by the water. They have no agency over what happens to them, drifting at the whim of the tides. The enjambment between the first two lines creates a long, meandering sentence that evokes this drifting and highlights the contrast between the aimlessness of this "convoy" and the more purposeful action of most conveys.
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Lines 3-4
At night they ...
... in the foam. -
Lines 5-8
Between the sob ...
... upon their nakedness; -
Lines 9-12
And each cross, ...
... they begin – -
Lines 13-16
‘Unknown seaman’ – ...
... drowned men’s lips, -
Lines 17-20
Dead seamen, gone ...
... the other front.
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“Beach Burial” Symbols
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The Ghostly Pencil
In the third and fourth stanzas of "Beach Burial," the speaker focuses on a detailed description of the driftwood crosses that mark the dead soldiers' graves, and in particular on the faded pencil marks that read "Unknown seaman." In a literal sense, the speaker is describing how the writing appears ghostly because it has faded in the wind and water, but the pencil marks also symbolize the way that these anonymous men will inevitably be forgotten.
The speaker describes how the marking "Wavers and fades," emphasizing how despite the efforts of whoever made the graves, this memorial is already falling away. So in the same way, the memory of these men will also fade; they're already anonymous, and the speaker indicates through the symbol of the pencil that soon they won't be remembered at all. Just as their memorial has become "ghostly," so too will the men themselves become nothing more than ghosts.
Additionally, the pencil marks may also symbolize the speaker's fear that even writing this poem won't do much to mark the tragedy of the men's deaths. This poem is a kind of parallel to the inscriptions on the grave markers: it is the speaker's own attempt to memorialize the dead through writing. But though the speaker seems to hope that the poem will argue against the tragic wastefulness of war, the image of the fading pencil markings suggests a fear that this argument, too, will be forgotten as time (and readers' attention) moves on.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 13: “the ghostly pencil”
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“Beach Burial” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration is used frequently in "Beach Burial." For instance, it's prominent in lines 2 and 3:
The convoys of dead sailors come;
At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,The alliteration here, coupled with consonance, gives lines a sense of ebb and flow that conveys the way that the dead men's bodies drift helplessly on the tides.
Then, in line 6, the alliteration of "Someone" and "seems" has a whispery, watery sound—like a sea breeze (other /s/ consonance in this stanza adds to the effect).
The next example is in line 7, with "bury" and "burrows." These two /b/s sound insistent, emphasizing the determination of "someone" to see that the men get some kind of makeshift burial—even if it is in shifting sands and with crosses made of driftwood.
Next up is line 11:
Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,
The alliteration here draws the reader's attention to the material construction of the line, the fact that is something written. This in turn supports the starkness of the image of the makeshift crosses and the writing upon them. The repeating sounds also give the line a dense feeling, reinforcing the idea that whoever wrote the words had to push through confusion and pain in order to do so.
In line 17, three /s/ words alliterate ("seaman," "search, and "same"). This sibilant sound is associated with the sea, and so its repeated use evokes the endless—eternal—search of the men for the peace of the afterlife.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 2: “convoys,” “sailors,” “come”
- Line 3: “sway,” “wander,” “waters”
- Line 6: “Someone,” “seems”
- Line 7: “bury,” “burrows”
- Line 11: “Written with,” “ such ,” “perplexity,” “with,” “ such,” “pity”
- Line 15: “wet,” “washed”
- Line 17: “seamen,” “search,” “same”
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Diacope
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Enjambment
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Metaphor
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Paradox
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"Beach Burial" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Gulf of Arabs
- Convoys
- Sob
- Clubbing
- Burrows
- Tidewood
- Perplexity
- Bewildered
- Inscriptions
- Landfall
- Enlisted
- Front
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “Gulf of Arabs”)
This is a bay near the Egyptian city of Alexandria.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Beach Burial”
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Form
"Beach Burial" is made up of five quatrains (four-line stanzas). The poem could be considered an elegy because of the way it laments the dead, though elegies are usually more specific in terms of who they are talking about (one of the speaker's main points is that the dead men's identities are unknown).
The poem doesn't follow any particular set form, and instead is itself is a kind of voyage (in keeping with the discussion of sailors). It starts with the dead bodies washing up on the shore, before thinking about who buries them. The speaker investigates the makeshift graves, noticing their tragic anonymity, before imagining the men embarking on a new journey—death and whatever comes after.
The poem makes use of long, meandering sentences that seem to ebb and flow like tides. The third line of each stanza is longer than the other three lines, highlighting this sense of wandering motion. And other than the one at the end of the poem, there is just one full stop in the whole poem (after "foam" at the end of the first stanza). This gives the poem a sense of pull and push, a certain restlessness that evokes both the movement of the bodies in the water and the speaker's difficulty in understanding why so much young life had to be wasted.
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Meter
"Beach Burial" isn't regular enough to say that it's governed by one specific meter, but the poet definitely pays attention to the metrical sound of the lines throughout.
Roughly speaking, the first, second, and fourth lines of each stanza have four stresses, while the third lines of each stanza have six stresses. This variation in line length is important. Though the precise number of syllables in each line varies, the relative predictability of the number of stresses gives the poem a sense of push and pull reminiscent of a tide—and tides, of course, are what bring the dead men to the shore.
As an example, here is the first stanza:
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.Only the final line has a consistent meter (iambic tetrameter, which uses four poetic feet per line with a da-DUM rhythm), but all the lines feature a gentle, rolling alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables. The other stanzas repeat this general pattern, emulating the regularity of tides while also containing enough variation to suggest the ever-changing coastal environment.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Beach Burial" doesn't have a precise rhyme scheme, but it nonetheless uses rhyme throughout. In each stanza, every second and fourth line rhyme, with some rhymes more full than others. In stanza four, for example, "lips" and "drips" rhyme loud and clear. Conversely, "this" and "nakedness" in stanza two rhyme in a more subtle way. The rhyme is gentle but purposeful throughout, perhaps evoking the lifeless but inevitable movement of the men's bodies on the tide as they wash ashore.
There is another aspect to the rhyme too, hidden away within the third line of each stanza. These lines use subtle internal rhyme, usually in the form of slant rhyme: "wander"/"under," "shallows"/"burrows," "perplexity"/"pity," season"/"inscriptions," "neither"/"together." These rhymes support the poem's sense of momentum, giving these lines a kind of lurching motion like water receding from a shore.
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“Beach Burial” Speaker
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The speaker in "Beach Burial" is unspecified. They don't refer to themselves as an "I," but the poem feels like it is written in the first-person, since seems to be a series of observations based on a specific personal experience. Furthermore, Slessor had first-hand experience of World War Two and this specific geographical location, so the poem is generally taken to be partly autobiographical. But it's noticeable that Slessor doesn't include too much by way of specifics (the poem doesn't mention Slessor's native Australia, for example), emphasizing that the experience related here is somewhat universal—everyone, the lack of detail suggests, should feel this sad about the needless destruction of war.
The speaker feels an instinctive sympathy for the dead men, sensing the tragic loss of young life. This sense of loss is brought to life by the speaker's close attention to detail, for example in the observations of the makeshift grave markers. In a sense, the speaker performs the same function as the "someone" who buried the men—giving the dead whatever memorial is possible under these tragic circumstances.
In the last stanza, the speaker makes an interesting revelation, acknowledging with the word "us" (in "fought with us") that they were on one particular side of the war (which makes sense given the autobiographical context). But what's notable is that there isn't a hint of patriotism or nationalistic pride—the side that the speaker supports seems totally irrelevant. By mentioning—but not emphasizing—their own allegiance, the speaker suggests that the tragedy of the war, in its immense loss of human life, extends to humanity as a whole.
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“Beach Burial” Setting
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As the title suggests, the poem is set on a beach. Specifically, it takes place in a coastal area in the Gulf of Arabs, near the port city of Alexandria (a city in Egypt). In fact, Slessor is thought to have written the poem after the Battle of El Alamein in World War Two.
The poem also has a ghostly and surreal atmosphere. There is the sense that, while WWII is its literal setting, the poem also takes place outside of time in a more abstract sense. Perhaps that's because it opens with an image of death, which informs the poem's generally somber tone throughout. The focus on "ghostl[iness]" and the afterlife makes the particulars of the battle feel almost irrelevant now—the battle has already taken its tragic toll, and the losses of war matter more than the war itself.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Beach Burial”
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Literary Context
Kenneth Slessor was an Australian poet, correspondent, and journalist who went to numerous battle sites during World War Two. Slessor was one of Australia's earliest widely-renowned poets, and "Beach Burial" is probably his second-most famous poem after "Five Bells."
Slessor's poem avoids being patriotic or glamorizing war, as tends to be the case with war poets who, like Slessor, experienced war's horrors themselves. With this in mind, then, the poem has little in common with a poem like Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier" (a WWI poem) and much more similarity to the work of World War One poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfreif Sassoon, or to the work of Keith Douglas, who wrote brilliantly about the realities of World War Two (in "Simplify Me When I'm Dead," for example). Slessor's work also has themes in common with two other prominent Australian war poets, Douglas Stewart and John Manifold.
Though "Beach Burial" is one of Slessor's most famous works, war poetry is a relatively small part of his overall body of work. In fact, he wrote only two poems during World War Two—this one and "An Inscription for Dog River." Within the wider context of war poetry, "Beach Burial" is quite experimental. The rhymes are intentionally inexact, and the form is innovative (with its long third lines in each stanza).
Historical Context
As a war correspondent during World War Two, Slessor traveled far afield. At various points during the conflict he was stationed in places as geographically diverse as North Africa, Crete, Syria and Papua New Guinea. This poem is thought to have been inspired by the fallout after fighting in Egypt.
World War Two was the second horrendous conflict that humankind inflicted on itself during the 20th century. Around four times as many people died in WWII compared to WWI—approximately 70 million. The lead-up to WWII was long and complex, but put simplistically, it was based on the desire of Adolf Hitler to reinstate Germany's might and power following the harsh sanctions and limitations imposed on the country after WWI. Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, signed an agreement which allocated certain land to the Germans—and seemed to prevent the outbreak of major war (this is known as the Munich Agreement). Thinking that Chamberlain and his allies would be reluctant to actually go to war, Hitler soon made a grab for more territory, invading Poland in late 1939. Soon after, Britain declared war on Germany and other countries followed suit.
The conflict drew in many countries around the world, with Italy and Japan joining Germany (to form the Axis powers), and with the other side eventually including the Americans, the Russians, and most of Europe. The war officially ended on September 2nd, 1945, with the surrender of Japan.
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More “Beach Burial” Resources
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External Resources
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"Beach Burial" Read Aloud — A reading of the poem, with additional analysis.
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World War II Poetry — A valuable sampler of WWII poetry curated by the Poetry Foundation.
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More Poems by Slessor — A selection of other works by the poet.
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Further Slessor Biography — An in-depth account of Slessor's life, provided by the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
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Slessor Radio Documentary — A program provided by ABC about Slessor's life and work.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Kenneth Slessor
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