"The Enemies" begins with a mysterious arrival. "Last night," the speaker reports, a crowd of unknown people "came across the river and / Entered the city." The language here flings readers right into the middle of the action. The speaker doesn't even feel the need to say what city this is: it's just "the city." It's as if the readers, too, are citizens, listening to the gossip about what happened the night before.
As the speaker tells it, the "women" of the city welcomed the new arrivals with open arms, bringing "lights and food," unhesitatingly hosting the strangers. No one asked "what strange tongue [the strangers] spoke" or "why they came so suddenly" to the city; they just offered instinctive hospitality. But the fact that the speaker remarks on that hospitality suggests that there's something unusual about such openness. Among the many questions the women did not ask, the speaker notes, is "what the men had come to take"—not the sort of question one would even dream of asking a welcome guest.
In this moment of kindness, then, there's a hint of trouble to come. The city has welcomed the strangers for now, but they might not stay so friendly. Even the poem's rhythms suggest a certain tension. Listen to the halting enjambments in lines 1-3, for instance:
Last night they came across the river and
Entered the city. Women were awake
With lights and food. [...]
These mid-sentence breaks appear at odd moments, introducing little jolts of tension: what will the unexpected "they" do after they cross the river? How will the women respond?
And then there's the poem's meter. The poem mostly ticks along in iambic pentameter—lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Not ask- | ing what | the men | had come | to take." In line 5, though, the poem falls back to iambic trimeter, just three iambs in a row: "Or what | strange tongue | they spoke." The shorter line feels hesitant, as if it's drawing back in fear.
The speaker's vagueness about identity and location makes this poem feel rather mysterious and tense, too. All the players here feel as if they could have come from a fairy tale: there are just the "band" who arrive, the "river" they cross, the "city" they enter, the "women" who greet them. Perhaps that ambiguity sets readers up to interpret this story symbolically or allegorically as well as literally. This doesn't seem to be a story about a particular incident, but one that could happen anywhere, any time.