John Allan Wyeth
Steep prickly slopes in shadow from the moon
sagging behind us down the strident sky.
Guns blaze and slam. The stars burn fever bright.
A low white ridge ahead, and the crumpled sound
of shelling.
“Jerry’s out—”
A snarling croon
wheels over us—quick glittering tracers fly
down a pale searchlight, and along the ground
bombs blast into smoky yellow shot with light.
“These runners will get you up there pretty soon.
—Take them up to the Second Battalion.”
My tongue goes dry
and scrapy, and my lips begin to jerk—
—”Look out for the gas—they been pumping it in all night.”
“Let’s go, Tommy.”
“0 God wait a minute—I’ve found
something wrong with my mask—the damn thing doesn’t work.”
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Analysis (AI Assisted)
This poem drops you straight into a moment of tension, where the landscape itself seems to resist movement. The slopes are steep and prickly, and the moon doesn’t just sit in the sky—it sags, like even the night is exhausted. The war is everywhere, but the focus isn’t on heroism or grand strategy. It’s on what the body feels: the heat of the stars, the slam of the guns, the dryness in the throat when fear sets in.
Dialogue is scattered throughout, giving the sense of men talking not to communicate, but to push forward, to fill the space between the chaos. “Jerry’s out” is said almost casually, like a fact rather than a warning. A searchlight cuts the night, tracers flash, bombs explode, and then comes the real moment of dread—gas. The warning isn’t shouted; it’s just something to be aware of, another part of the job.
But then there’s the personal crisis. A soldier realizes his gas mask is faulty, and suddenly the poem shifts from tense anticipation to outright panic. It’s not the explosions, the gunfire, or even the fact that they’re heading toward danger that breaks him—it’s this one detail, this one piece of equipment that’s supposed to keep him alive, and it’s failing him at exactly the wrong moment. That’s the kind of fear that war poets capture so well: not just fear of death, but fear of helplessness, of something going wrong that you can’t fix.
The poem doesn’t give us a resolution. It stops with that moment of realization, with a plea to wait, to fix what might already be too late to fix. That’s what makes it powerful—it doesn’t tie anything up neatly, because war doesn’t work like that.