Six short lines are enough here to turn church, silver and a soft bed into things that hurt. The title, "In mourning," sets the key, and it also hides a pun. Say it aloud and it sounds like "in morning," which suggests a sleepless night and the grey light that follows. Whether or not Bonta intended the echo, the poem fits it: it reads like the thoughts of someone awake while everyone else is resting, unable to find peace in the places where peace is supposed to be.
The first stanza begins with a flat, startling metaphor: "Church is a dull ache." Church is usually offered as a remedy for grief, but here it is the pain. The word "dull" matters. This is not a sharp, dramatic suffering but a constant, low throb, the kind you carry through a service without ever being relieved of it. The next line lurches into violence: "having an urge to hit an urn / laced with silver." Grammatically the phrase hangs loose, since nobody is named as the one "having" the urge, and that looseness suits a speaker too worn down to say "I want." The urn is the obvious emblem of death, a container for ashes, and the impulse to strike it is the anger that often hides inside mourning. The sounds make the urge physical. "Urge" and "urn" chime together, and both are trapped in the vowel of "ache" and "hit" on either side, so the line feels like a clenched fist.
"Laced with silver" is the richest phrase in the poem because it can mean several things. Lace is delicate decoration, so the urn might simply be ornamented, a costly object polished for display. "Laced" also means spiked or tainted, as with a drink, which makes the silver faintly poisonous. Silver can suggest church plate, money, or the hair of the old. The poem doesn't choose, and each reading carries the same suspicion: that the rituals and ornaments surrounding death are a glittering surface laid over something raw. The speaker wants to hit the shine.
The second stanza widens the view. "War after war" is a sweeping phrase, a whole history of conflict in three words, and the repetition acts out the way wars keep coming. Then the pronouns arrive. The first stanza has no one in it, but now there is "we," and finally "I." The movement from "we lay in a bed so soft" to "I could not sleep" is a quiet drop from the shared to the private. A "we" lived comfortably through all those wars, and one "I" cannot bear it. The softness of the bed becomes the problem. Comfort, in a world of continual war and death, feels like a kind of guilt, so the speaker cannot rest in it. The verb "lay" adds a darker note, because lying down also recalls burial and the laying-out of the dead. The bed hints at a grave.
The sound patterns help the irony. The last stanza is full of soft sibilants: "so soft," "sleep," and, back in the first stanza, "silver." These are hushing, lulling sounds, and the line they build ends by denying exactly what they suggest. The final line, "I could not sleep," is four short, plain words with no ornament, and it lands like a door closing. The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its lines run from four syllables to eight, uneven in the way a restless night is uneven, and the ending is flat rather than resolved.
That refusal to resolve is what makes the poem worth reading. It doesn't console or explain who has died or which wars it means. Its compression leaves gaps, and the reader has to fill them, perhaps with a personal loss, perhaps with history, perhaps with both at once. By setting private grief beside the long record of war, and by letting the church and the soft bed fail as comforts, it suggests that mourning is not only for one person but for a world that goes on sleeping, and that the one who stays awake is the one who truly mourns.