Dreams are a gentle way to begin a war poem, and George Burnett Devine knows it. "Memories of 'Over There'" opens almost lazily: "Sometimes when I am dreaming, / My thoughts drift to and fro." The speaker is a veteran, and the setting he drifts toward is "the distant fields of Flanders / Where the crimson poppies blow." Flanders poppies are already a well-worn emblem of the First World War, and the poem leans on that familiarity at first. But Devine gradually turns the dream from something pleasant into something that cannot be switched off, and by the final stanza it has become an argument about the people who have come home.
The first half of the poem is soft-focused. The road at dusk is lit by "a sky of rose and purple," and the speaker walks it with "my dream pals by my side." Even the singing is homely: the boys are "softly singing" the old music-hall-style tune about the gray mare who "ain't what she used to be." The joke inside that line is worth noticing. The mare is a cheerful nonsense image, but the phrase "ain't what she used to be" could just as easily describe the men themselves. The song is sung lightly and means something heavier.
Then the poem pivots on one word: "I see the storm clouds gather." Weather takes over from sunset, and the lovely sky is replaced by "the star-shell's afterglow," a flare used to light up no man's land at night. The beauty of the earlier stanzas has quietly been built from the same raw material as the horror. Devine reinforces the shift with a habit that appears twice, repeating a noun with an exclamation: "the faces, oh, the faces" and "the trenches, oh, the trenches." These interruptions feel like the speaker catching his breath, unable to finish a sentence calmly. Notably, he never says whose faces they are. The omission suggests they are too many, or too close, to name.
The most unsettling image is the trenches "with their human harvest fill'd." Harvest normally implies abundance and reward, and the poem has already supplied a field setting, so the metaphor grows naturally out of the landscape of Flanders. Here, though, what is gathered in is the dead. The comrades "whose hearts in death are stilled" are mentioned almost in passing, which makes the harvest image hit harder. The word "spectre" in "spectre scenes of sorrow" fits the way the poem works: the dream-comrades of the opening are, by the end, ghosts.
Formally, the poem is plain and song-like. The stanzas are quatrains with a loose alternating rhyme, the second and fourth lines usually answering each other (blow with go, sorrow-style closings, "chang" aside, the pattern is "relief" with "grief," "stilled" with "fill'd"). The lines are short, with a ballad-like beat of about three or four stresses, close to the rhythm of a marching song, which suits a poem that has soldiers singing as they walk. The simplicity is a strength. There is no elaborate argument, only a repeated rocking motion that mimics the swaying of memory.
The final stanza is where the poem steps out of the dream and speaks to its readers. "The world, unheeding, thoughtless, / Wonders at the waywardness / Of the boys who wore the khaki." The tone sharpens into reproach. Civilians look at returned soldiers and see only "discontented restlessness," without understanding what the men carry. The poem has just spent six stanzas showing the reader, from the inside, why such restlessness might exist, so the last lines work as an answer to a question the world was too impatient to ask.
That is what gives the poem its interest. It is not a battle scene or a roll of heroism. It is about the aftermath of experience, the way the past keeps arriving uninvited, and about the gap between those who remember and those who do not. Devine's language is simple enough that the feeling comes through undistorted: wistful at the start, shaken in the middle, and quietly indignant at the close.