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What a hasrrowing story this poem tells! It resonates with me with particular force, because my husband, during World War II, spent two days passing a "body"--one of many--at the scene of a recent tank battle, and on the second day heard a faint "Help" from the green lips of the supposed corpse. He alerted the command post and the medics, and the man survived. Like stories of live burial, accounts of this kind are unbearable, because they evoke the primitive horror of being trapped in the limbo between death and life, without the comforts of either.
The choice of the villanelle as a form for this is the first of this poems's many triumphs: the villanelle may be famous for its musicality and charm, but it's also the perfect form for obsession, espcially when that obsession involves a duality, a choice difficult or impossible to make. The austere, unadorned language the poet has chosen to use is another triumph, and so is the use of repetition (cold, white, snow). The details are few and well chosen: bullet, persistent inability to move, three days.
In the final satanza, the phrase of "to run like lightning" is heart-breaking in its evocation of the young soldier's speed, agility and force, especially followed in the next line by "ghosts of kin who see how still I've grown/in three days." What a wonderful use of enjambment!
The whole poem is a somber triumph. Even the one line about which I had some doubt--"though surely death has claimed me for its own"--has come to feel right, as if the dying man had the right to a formality of phrase not in keeping with the desperate situation that surrounds him. No, I can't find a single nit to pick. But the rest of you, go right ahead!
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