Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Soldiers” looks at the aftermath of battle, not through action but through a series of strange, almost hallucinatory images of dead men’s faces. One smile is “a fierce mermaid / Floating dead in a little pale-brown pond,” lips are twisted into “a hieroglyphic of silence,” another face is “like a shining frog.” The speaker seems both horrified and numbly fascinated, turning human features into alien, unsettling pictures. The mood is eerie and bitterly ironic: death has reduced these soldiers to grotesque objects, their faces frozen in expressions that no longer communicate anything human. The final couplet tightens that feeling—they lie in a “sprawling crescent,” and their faces together make “a gravely mocking sentence,” as if the dead themselves are delivering a judgment on war.
Soldiers — Summary
The smile of one face is like a fierce mermaid Floating dead in a little pale-brown pond. The lips of one are twisted To a hieroglyphic of silence. The face of another is like a shining frog. Another face is met by a question That digs into it like sudden claws. Beside it is a face like a mirror In which a stiffened child dangles.... Dead soldiers, in a sprawling crescent, Whose faces form a gravely mocking sentence.