The Night Patrol Poem Analysis

The first world war, also known by the natives of Canada as the Great War, was one of the most brutal, horrific, and tragic wars in human history. In order to help fight this war, Canada forced thousands of Native citizens to fight in a war that was not theirs to fight. These men fought alongside British and American soldiers, and over the course of the war many stories and tales were written. One notable piece of work from the Great War is the poem “The Night Patrol,” written by Arthur Graeme West. This poem details the horrifying experience of going “over the top,” referring to the act of climbing over the trench and onto no man 's land. The poem does a great job of depicting the gruesome reality of warfare during WW1, however, along with
Throughout “The Night Patrol,” West demonstrates a very rich and colourful use of imagery. The poem is full of imagery that does a great job at helping to depict what the battlefield, and trench warfare looked like. One example of this usage of imagery is on lines 14 to 16, where West writes, “ The sodden ground was splashed with shallow pools, and tufts of crackling cornstalks, two years old, no man had reaped, and patches of spring grass” (West, 14-16). This quote helps the reader picture what no man’s land looked like, and it goes somewhat in-depth about the surroundings in that specific scene. West writes in such a way that the reader feels as though he is experiencing the battlefield for himself, allowing the reader to imagine what a wet, muddy, sodden ground splashed with shallow pools and tufts of crackling cornstalks would look like. West accomplishes this great sense of visualization again when he begins to describe the dead all around him on lines 21 to 25, “Shot fruitlessly — and everywhere the dead. Only the dead were always present — present. As a vile sickly smell of rottenness; The rustling stubble and the early grass, The slimy pools — the dead men stank through all” (West, 21-25). Here, West does a great job at depicting what the scenery on no man’s land was like. He writes about how the dead are riddled throughout, about the vile smell that
During the war, a countless number of issues and problems arose concerning the soldiers’ well-being, the governments, and the citizens back home. Issues like the constant threat on their lives, racism, and addiction, are just a few among many others, however these issues truly defined the war. “The Night Patrol” looks at only a few of the issues and struggles that the soldiers faced on a day to day basis. West uses the poem to show the reader a pure sense of survivalism, helping the reader see how every soldier was faced with the constant struggle for survival, something very prominent among the soldiers in the trenches, and especially relevant to the ones who entered no man’s land. A quote from the poem to support this would be on lines 44 to 46, where West writes, “We crawled on belly and elbows, till we saw, Instead of lumpish dead before our eyes, The stakes and crosslines of the German wire” (West, 44-46). This quote subtly shows the lengths these men would go to in order to fulfill their orders, and hopefully one day make it home alive. They are crawling under hundreds of feet of barbed wire, climbing over the dead bodies of their fellow soldiers, all in-order to accomplish their mission. The entirety of the poem gives off this sense of survivalism, but it also helps to define how gruesome WW1 truly was. Ruthlessness and vulgarity are very common issues in wars, and when West describes the