The title, "Gloria mundi," echoes the Latin idea of worldly glory, and the poem sets that grandeur against how little of it lasts. It opens with a strange comparison: someone who "bled less than the blade but more than the dirt." The blade is a weapon, the dirt is the ground that soaks everything up, and the figure sits somewhere between them. It's hard to say whether this is a soldier, a victim, or just a stand-in for anyone who took part in a fight.
Then the voice shifts to "we," and the boast arrives: "we were mighty." It lands flat, because the next line cancels it: "it is all dead news." The pun on "dead" suggests both outdated and literally dead. The speaker seems weary, maybe bitter, looking back on past power that no one cares about now. The mood is cold and quiet, with a dry, ironic edge. Nothing is mourned loudly; the glory is simply filed away as something stale.