As It Was In The Beginning - Analysis

The refrain as a trap: war as something we keep calling fate

Lawson’s central claim is bleakly circular: the march toward death is presented as a cultural constant, endlessly re-justified, endlessly repeated. The poem keeps returning to As it was in the beginning and so we’ll find it, phrasing that sounds like scripture or a solemn proverb. That tone matters. It turns human decisions into something that feels pre-written, as if history has only one groove. Yet the poem’s insistence starts to feel accusatory: if this is what we find every time, what have we been willing to accept as normal?

Private rooms, public deaths: the gendered split the poem won’t let you forget

The poem repeatedly divides the scene into two spaces: women indoors and men outdoors, women holding and men leaving. We see weak women hug their babies, pale women pray in private, and later the women think of some things; against this, the refrain lands like a hammer: strong men go out to die. The bluntness of go out makes dying sound like an errand, a duty folded into the day. Meanwhile women are described through physical gestures—hugging, praying—suggesting emotional labor that is constant but socially contained. The poem’s tone here is not tender; it’s stark, almost documentary, as if it’s recording an arrangement that has become routine.

Reasons that multiply, certainty that doesn’t

One of the poem’s sharpest moves is how it piles up motives for sacrifice: their State, their Country, their Honour, their Creed, love of Right, hatred of the Everlasting Lie. The list makes the justifications feel interchangeable. This creates a tension: the speaker sounds sure that men will die, but less sure what exactly is worth dying for. Even the moral language is split between an abstract Right and an equally abstract Lie, suggesting that high ideals can be invoked on either side of a conflict. The refrain doesn’t care which reason wins; it only cares that the outcome is the same.

The body in the dust: heroism and its uglier proof

The third stanza forces the poem’s talk of honour into the physical reality it implies. The fallen man is stretching forward with his face down in the dust, his wounds in front. The detail blood to earth and back to sky is both vivid and strangely ceremonial, as if the body completes a grim exchange between the world below and something above. Calling the wounds hidden is especially telling: even when we praise All his wounds in front as proof of bravery, the poem reminds us that the body still disappears into anonymity. This is the cost behind the smooth phrases about country and creed.

Rebels, brothers, and a God who decrees: the poem’s hardest contradiction

Near the end the speaker declares, Rebels all we are, even rebels to the laws we make, and insists that men fight for another’s sake. But almost immediately comes the opposite idea: It is all as God decreed it. The poem holds these two claims in tension without resolving them. If we are rebels, this cycle is something we choose, re-enact, and could interrupt; if it is decreed, then grief becomes merely endurance. The clash reads less like theology than like cultural self-excuse: calling it God can be a way to stop asking who benefits from the arrangement and who pays.

The late turn: when girls dress as boys

The final stanza delivers the poem’s turn, and it lands like a quiet indictment. After all the familiar pairings—women indoors, men dying—the poem adds: our girls, disguised in boys’ clothes, who go to die where strong men die. The disguise implies barriers, not destiny: girls must change themselves to enter the same fatal script. At the same time, the line exposes how little the script values any body once it is available for sacrifice. The poem’s earlier gender certainty dissolves into a darker equality: the machine can expand to include whoever can be made to fit the uniform.

A question the poem forces: what does it mean to call this the beginning?

By repeating in the beginning and in the end, the poem makes war sound foundational, like a creation story. But the last image of girls in disguise suggests not an eternal law but an evolving demand for lives. If the pattern can change enough to require new disguises, then it isn’t fate in the pure sense. It is tradition, ideology, and pressure—human forces wearing the mask of inevitability.