In this poem, the poet describes a contemporary war that was more intense than those of the old days and the desperation for the soldiers to return from the war . When the speaker heard the news that his friend, who had served in that war, would be returning, he found himself in an emotional conflict between the anxiety of seeing his friend return from the war and the worry whether his friend was still alive or not. not because he understood the cruelty of war. A possible theme of this poem is the senselessness of war and the desperation for the soldiers to escape from that intense warfare. The purpose of the poem is to convey the speaker's contradictory emotions about his friend's fate on the battlefield. This poem consists of a stanza of eighteen lines. There is a non-structural pattern in the arrangement of the lines. The poet first describes a war more cruel than the previous one (in the first four lines), then the description of his friend's attributes (from the fifth to the eighth line), and then his reactions to the news that his friend had been killed. returning from the war (from the ninth line to the end). In the first four lines, only one third person plural pronoun 'they' is found in these few lines. This feature suggests that, perhaps, the speaker was not involved in the war. He acted as an outsider to describe the war. Word choices including “fight,” “soldiers,” “die,” and “battlefield” refer to war. Then, from the fifth line to the eighth line, it begins to have the use of first person singular pronouns. In the fifth line there is a use of "I" and "you", which refer to the speaker and his friend respectively. It shows the involvement of the speaker and his friend in the events starting from the fifth line. Additionally, multiple modifiers are used to describe the speaker's friend. Examples are "weak", "indolent", "hopeless", "young". They all show his friend's inexperience and weakness on the battlefield. From the ninth line onwards, there are more uses of the third person plural pronoun "you" and "your", which shows that most of the statements are related to the speaker's friend. In these lines the poet describes how weak the speaker's friend was, and therefore how worried and afraid he was when considering whether his friend was alive or not..