And The Sun Went Down - Analysis

Introduction and tone

This dramatic excerpt presents a brutal nocturnal naval engagement where victory is won at terrible cost. The tone moves between triumphant and mournful: celebration of survival and anger toward the enemy sit beside stark images of loss and wreckage. Repetition and vivid battle details keep the reader immersed in the immediacy and exhaustion of combat.

Relevant context

Though not explicitly dated in the excerpt, the language and imagery evoke Elizabethan naval warfare and collective English memory of fights with the Spanish fleet. That backdrop helps explain the poem’s mix of national pride and grief for the heavy human toll.

Main theme: Heroism and sacrifice

The poem frames endurance under overwhelming odds as heroic: the repeated line about the fight of the one and the fifty-three emphasizes David-and-Goliath courage. Victory is acknowledged—“we had not fought them in vain”—but immediately tempered by the catalogue of losses: forty of our poor hundred were slain, many maim’d for life. Heroism thus appears inseparable from sacrifice.

Main theme: Cost of victory and mortality

Images of broken bodies and matériel—sick men stark and cold, pikes all broken or bent, powder... spent—underscore that triumph has a ruinous human cost. The juxtaposition of the sun and stars with ruined ships suggests the indifferent continuity of nature against the finite lives lost in war.

Imagery and symbols

The recurring sea and sky imagery—the sun setting, stars coming out, then the sun rising—functions as a temporal frame and a symbol of cyclical endurance. Ships and rigging, repeatedly described as shattered or lying over the side, symbolize the collapse of human structures and the physical toll of combat. The enemy’s reluctance to renew the attack—“they fear’d that we still could sting”—adds ironic tension: the victors are feared despite being crippled.

Final insight

By pairing triumphant rhetoric with precise, somber detail, the poem makes a moral claim: courage and national victory are real but inseparable from suffering and loss. Its lasting power comes from that uneasy balance between glory and the human wreckage left in its wake.