Alliteration makes the language of "Vergissmeinnicht" evocative and visceral, bringing its grim imagery to life on the page.
Check out the /s/ sibilance in line 4, for example, when the speaker and his fellow soldiers find the dead German:
the soldier sprawling in the sun.
Sibilance evokes the eerie silence of the scene at hand. At the same time, these /s/ sounds seem to sizzle with heat, evoking the desert environment (the poem was based on Douglas's experiences at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt). Later, the sibilance of "skin" and "swart" makes the graphic descriptions of the body all the more unsettling.
In lines 7 and 8, the plosive /d/ sound evokes the power of the impact of anti-tank artillery:
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.
That /d/ packs a strong punch, working with the monosyllabic words in line 7 to give the reader a sense of what it's like to come under enemy fire.
Note, too, that the poem also features consonance that overlaps with and enhances the poem's alliteration. Take the third stanza, which is brimming with hissing sibilance alongside spiky, popping /k/, /t/, /p/, and hard /g/sounds:
Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.
The lines feel sharp and perhaps even bitter. The crisp language makes the image itself seem clearer.
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