Dickinson opens with an odd bit of grammar. We expect "God bless him," but the speaker says "Bless God," turning the usual prayer around and putting the verb first. Two more verb-first phrases follow, "Grant God" and "Please God," so the poem moves in short, breathless commands, as if the words were hurried out between one worry and the next. The poem is about someone who has gone to war and someone who has stayed behind. What looks like a salute to a soldier gradually becomes a confession of fear.
The first stanza is all pride. "He went as soldiers" is a telling phrase: a single man leaves, but the plural makes him one of a type, someone who went the way soldiers go. The speaker hopes he will "charge the bravest / Of all the martial blest." Yet there is an irony she may not intend. The bravest man is usually the one who charges furthest forward, so the wish for his courage is also, quietly, a wish that puts him in danger. Judging by the poem's tension, the speaker does not quite see this, or will not look at it. The "musket on his breast" is a crisp, well-chosen detail. It is a soldier's posture, but the word "breast" also names the very place where a bullet would land, and the image carries both ideas at once.
The second stanza turns from him to her. The first stanza is full of "he" and "his," while the second is dominated by "I." The speaker asks to "behold him / In epauletted white," and the long, ornate word "epauletted" slows the line down like a ceremony. It suggests a dress uniform, shoulders bright with decoration, a soldier seen as a picture and not as a man in mud and smoke. White also rhymes with "fight," so the colour of ceremony and the reality of battle are tied together. The poem leaves open whether she hopes to see him in a parade or in some more final vision, and that uncertainty is part of its pull.
The most revealing lines are the last two: "I should not fear the foe then -- / I should not fear the fight!" The repetition sounds like someone talking herself into courage. Notice the word "should." It makes the sentence conditional: she would not fear if she could see him, which admits that for now she does. Her fear is also oddly direct. She speaks of fearing "the foe" and "the fight" as though she were standing in the line herself, which shows how completely his danger has become hers. The dash before "then" gives the thought a small hesitation, and the closing exclamation mark reads less as confidence than as insistence.
The form supports all this. The lines alternate between seven and six syllables in a mostly iambic beat, close to the hymn and ballad patterns Dickinson often used. That familiar, singable shape suits a prayer, and its steadiness works against the speaker's agitation. The rhyme is sparing. Only the second and fourth lines of each stanza chime, "breast" with "blest" and "white" with "fight," while the first and third lines go unrhymed. The two rhyme pairs are the poem's emotional anchors. The first links the soldier's body to the idea of blessing, and the second sets the dazzle of the uniform against the violence it leads to.
Part of the poem's significance lies in what it leaves out. There is no battlefield, no description of the enemy, and no cause being defended. The poem suggests a wartime setting, but it gives us only the view from the waiting side, where courage and dread are impossible to separate. In eight short lines Dickinson shows how a prayer can be a way of managing fear, and how the language of glory, with its muskets, epaulettes and blessed warriors, can be something frightened people hold on to.