Survivors by Alan Ross

With the ship burning in their eyes

The white faces float like refuse

In the darkness - the water screwing

Oily circles where the hot steel lies.

They clutch with fingers frozen into claws

The lifebelts thrown from a destroyer,

And see, between the future's doors,

The gasping entrance of the sea.

Taken on board as many as lived, who

Had a mind left for living and the ocean,

They open eyes running with surf,

Heavy with the grey ghosts of explosion.

The meaning is not yet clear,

Where daybreak died in the smile -

And the mouth remained stiff

And grinning, stupid for a while.

But soon they joke, easy and warm,

As men will who have died once

Yet somehow were able to find their way -

Muttering this was not included in their pay.

Later, sleepless at night, the brain spinning

With cracked images, they won't forget

The confusion and the oily dead,

Nor yet the casual knack of living.

This poem consists of six stanzas of four lines each. There is rhyme in the poem, but it doesn't seem to be structured - for example in the first stanza the first and last lines rhyme, in the second none rhyme and in the third the second and fourth lines rhyme. There is simile, as in the second line of the first stanza, where the dead faces floating in the water are compared to the bits of the destroyed ship. Metaphor is used abundantly in this poem - for example, in the first line of the first stanza and the third line of the second stanza. There is also personification used in lines 3-4 of the first stanza, where the water is described as "screwing oily circles". The poem is describing a ship being blown up and what happened to the survivors. From other projects and research I've done (in socials mostly), it seems a very accurate portrayal. The poem is very believable and I find I can relate to the author's descriptions of how the survivors feel after being rescued. The metaphors especially in this poem add a lot to the impact of the poem, because they help the reader to understand what the survivors are going through - something which would be difficult to do using literal language.