In the opening lines of "War Photographer," the speaker conjures an image of the title figure working alone in his dark room to develop his pictures. Without the context provided by the title of the poem, a reader might struggle to understand who the man is and what he is doing. Throughout the poem, Duffy plays with the juxtaposing forces of order and chaos: the title, for example, is the poem's first organizing factor, lending readers a helping hand in understanding the poem's subject that the text itself might not provide.
The first line ends with a sense of the photographer's isolation ("he is finally alone"), but the enjambment allows for a slight surprise at the start of the next line: he is not alone all by himself, but, rather, he is alone"with" the photographs he has taken. The safety and security proffered in the opening line get snatched by the second line's conjunction "with." Much like being alone with a monster, being alone and being alone "with" are drastically different experiences.
The images and word choice of the opening lines also play with multiple meanings. "Dark room," of course, literally describes the photographer's work space, but the darkness also foreshadows the photographer's despair and sense of being lost, though back at home in England. The "ordered rows" (line 2) of photographic film also bring to mind the image of a cemetery, signaling how readily the photographer's thoughts return to the tragedy he has witnessed.
The most heightened words in these first lines are "spools of suffering" (line 2), the description of the cylinders of photographic film containing images of the war zone and the violence the photographer has documented. The sibilance (spools of suffering set out) emphasizes this image. The photographer cannot help but see suffering in his craft now. The very tools of his trade have become intertwined with the atrocities he has captured on film. It seems pertinent, too, that the word "spool," when used as a verb, can mean both "wind"and its antonym, "unwind." The real, live suffering of human beings has been bottled up by the photographer's lens into these small cylinders, but, seen through the photographer's eyes, they unwind back into life-size memory, not just images but triggers for memories of the real people and real horror depicted.
Dissecting these lines on a formal level, lines 1-2 do not clearly capture the sturdiness of the iambic meter (da DUM) that will shape most of the poem's rhythms. Instead, the poem opens with an anapest (da da DUM) before a series of iambs, as if the photographer is tripping into the dark room before steadying himself:
In his dark | room he | is fi- | nally | alone
with spools | of suf- | fering | set out | in ord- | ered rows
This opening metrical moment immediately establishes the threat of unsteadiness—trauma, perhaps—that will permeate the entire poem.