Some of the figures of speech employed by this poem include simile, personification, and alliteration. In the first line, the speaker asks, "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?" He compares the young men who die in war to cattle, via simile, in order to emphasize the way they seem to be slaughtered, thoughtlessly, and by the thousands. A simile is a comparison of two unalike things using the word like or as...
Some of the figures of speech employed by this poem include simile, personification, and alliteration. In the first line, the speaker asks, "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?" He compares the young men who die in war to cattle, via simile, in order to emphasize the way they seem to be slaughtered, thoughtlessly, and by the thousands. A simile is a comparison of two unalike things using the word like or as.
In the next few lines, the guns are personified as feeling a "monstrous anger" and the rifles are "stuttering" while they "patter out their hasty orisons"; orisons are prayers, and so these lines personify the rifles by stating that they can pray. Personification is when something nonhuman is granted human characteristics. Later in this stanza, the "wailing shells" are personified as "choirs" that possess a "voice of mourning."
Alliteration is the repetition of the initial consonant sound in words, and it is often used to mimic or enhance the words' actual meaning. In the third line, the phrase "rifles' rapid rattle" is an example of alliteration. We can read the repeated "r" sound as echoing the sound guns make when fired over and over.
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