John Allan Wyeth
“All right Tom?”
“Yup ~~ I got it fixed ~~ let’s start.”
A slipping crumbly path through scratching brush’
down to the river road. Along the shore
a clanging leap of fire behind black trees
and a streak of shrillness slit the sky apart.
A sand road ~~ horses, guns in a cloudy rush,
and men, teeth clenched on tubes, who lashed and tore
through silence. Black still slopes ~~ a distant sneeze.
“Hear that? I tell you ~~ my eyes are beginning to smart.”
A vague black gulch ahead, and the secret hush
of evil creeping in the dark ~~ We passed
two soldiers, pain-white, and a man they bore
between, blind twisting head and drunken knees,
~~ like Christ.
“Come on, Bud ~~ There ~~ You just been gassed.”
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Analysis (AI Assisted)
The poem doesn’t build to its final moment in a conventional way. There’s no steady rise of tension, no clear emotional arc. It just moves, like the men it follows, from one detail to the next. There’s a sense of inevitability in that movement—of war as a force that sweeps people along, not with grand battles or heroic gestures, but with shifting light, broken paths, and sharp, brief shocks of destruction.
The setting is unstable. The path is “slipping” and “crumbly,” the brush is “scratching,” and there’s no solid ground, no safe footing. This isn’t a landscape to be moved *through*—it’s one that actively resists. And yet the men keep going, because that’s what they do. The war is happening around them, but it’s fragmented—“a clanging leap of fire,” “a streak of shrillness.” Sound and sight hit in sudden, disconnected bursts, like sensory impressions that haven’t fully settled in the mind. The men don’t react dramatically. There’s no shouting, no immediate recognition of danger. Even when someone points out a warning—“Hear that? I tell you ~~ my eyes are beginning to smart.”—it’s casual, observational. There’s no exclamation point, no panic. Just an acknowledgement of a creeping, invisible threat.
Then the shift happens. The “black gulch” ahead is “vague,” the danger still unnamed, but the imagery turns darker, heavier. The “secret hush of evil” suggests something beyond human violence, something unnatural in its quiet approach. And then the soldiers appear—not fighting, not running, but carrying a man between them. He isn’t just wounded; he’s *twisting*, *blind*, his body no longer his own. The comparison to Christ is immediate, stark, and devastating. There’s no glory here, no sacrifice that means anything. Just a man reduced to a stumbling, broken figure, his body betraying him.
The last line isn’t poetic, it isn’t grand. It’s blunt: *“Come on, Bud ~~ There ~~ You just been gassed.”* The war has no room for anything else. The horror isn’t in the words themselves, but in their flatness, in the way one soldier simply tells another what has happened, as if it were just another fact, another moment in the march forward. There’s no comfort, no attempt to soften it. The poem ends not with a realization or a climax, but with a quiet, inevitable descent into suffering.