The poem opens by alluding to one of the most common tropes of English love poetry—the redness of the beloved’s lips—and immediately juxtaposes it with an image of violent death: “Red lips are not so red / As the stained stones kissed by the English dead” (Lines 1-2). The speaker continues to build upon this jarring contrast between romantic idealization and the ugly reality of war in each of the lines that follow. In Line 3, the “kindness of wooed and wooer” (i.e. the beloved and the one who courts him/her) is derided as mere “shame” next to the “love pure” of the soldiers (Line 4), who are presumably driven to take part in the fighting by a deep patriotic love for their country and a sense of camaraderie for their fellow enlistees.

The speaker uses an apostrophe—a direct address to an absent or abstract person or thing (See Literary Devices)—in Line 5, addressing Love itself: “O Love, your eyes lose lure / When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!” (Lines 5-6). In other words, the sparkling attraction of a beloved’s eyes and even the appeal of Love itself lose their charm when the speaker notices the soldiers who have lost their vision by either traditional arms or chemical weapons on the battlefield, while the speaker remains sighted and plagued with survivor's guilt.