Kilmer's sonnet turns on two words: "And yet." Until then, the speaker describes an almost fairy-tale evening at sea. After them, the same night shows its other face. The poem's central idea is that beauty and atrocity can exist at the same moment, under the same sky, and that nature does not take sides between them.
The first eight lines build a spell. The sea is "level" and "fragile," the moon wears a "silver-veiled face," and the ship becomes "an enchanted place / Full of white mirth and golden sorcery." The colours are pale and precious: white, silver, gold. Even the emotions seem to take on a colour, as in the phrase "white mirth." The stars are drawn into the picture too, as old onlookers who "heed and envy young humanity." Kilmer lets the passage feel safe, but one word is a warning. "Fragile" suggests that this splendour could break. So does "for a time," which admits that the enchantment is borrowed. Even "careless laughter" begins to look double-edged. It means free from care, but it could also mean heedless of what is happening elsewhere.
The form supports this shift. The poem is a sonnet in iambic pentameter, and the octave follows the classic pattern *abba abba* (sea / face / place / sorcery; be / grace / race / humanity). The enclosed rhymes make the opening lines sound closed and self-contained, like a charmed circle. The sestet breaks the pattern for an alternating *cdcdcd* (away / red / grey / lead / way / dead). Its rhymes keep trading places, which gives the ending a harder, more insistent beat. The pivot comes exactly where a sonnet expects it, at line nine, and the sestet is shorter than the octave. Horror gets less space but arrives with more force.
The imagery of the second half works as a deliberate reversal of the first. The pale palette is replaced by "a strange and awful red" and a cloud "obscenely grey." Calm water now "blush[es]," a verb that suggests shame as well as blood. Kilmer's choice of "obscenely" is startling. It treats the smoke as something indecent, an offence against the scene that the moon had just made so lovely. The cloud rises "Before the moon," so the two pictures sit in one frame, and the sea has not changed. Only the speaker's distance from the violence has: "a hundred leagues away." The poem does not name the battle, and it does not need to. What matters is the gap between the speaker's calm and the slaughter beyond it.
The verbs are violent. Decks "crash with flying lead," and the word "lead" rhymes with "red" and "dead," so the metal, the blood and the corpses are tied together by sound. The waves "shroud" the dead, which turns the sea into a burial cloth. Earlier it was a stage for enchantment.
The most unsettling stroke is the return of the stars. In line 8 they "envy" the living. In the last two lines they "smile their immemorial way / On waves that shroud a thousand newly dead!" The envy has curdled into indifference. The stars are the same, but now they seem to smile coldly over a scene that does not move them. The contrast between "immemorial" and "newly" sets the age of the heavens against the freshness of the loss. The earlier "young humanity" also hangs over the ending, because the dead were young too. The exclamation mark that closes the poem sounds like a gasp rather than a flourish.
The poem is significant for how much it holds in fourteen lines without argument or protest. Kilmer does not lecture about war. He lets one evening's loveliness stand beside its cost and lets the reader feel the clash. The dedication "For My Mother" gives it an intimate, almost confiding tone, as though the scene is being described to someone close. Kilmer himself died in the First World War, which adds a sad weight to the poem's wartime title, but the poem needs no biography to be felt. The speaker's guilt-tinged awareness, enjoying peace while others die, remains unsettling because the beauty in the poem is real, and so is the horror.