As the aerial raid progresses toward active bombing, Macaulay utilizes impressionist techniques and sparse diction to immerse the reader in the sensory overwhelm of the aerial raid and focalize the civilians’ panic and trauma. The onomatopoeic “Crash!” evokes a vividly jarring sound image (Macaulay 68). The exclamation is abrupt and unexpected, mirroring the panic-inducing air raid. This sensory immersion draws the reader into the civilians’ somatic and psychic reality, which is fragmented by trauma. The poem’s fractured structure suggests that the severe trauma of an aerial raid disturbs the civilians’ psyche, resulting in an inability to organize stimuli. Consumed with a concern of immediate survival, civilians struggle to articulate the trauma of the raid through full sentences. Moreover, the short sentences and focus on the present exemplify the unrelenting anxiety of experiencing an unpredictable bomb raid. Using present-tense interjections such as “Crash!”, the speaker abandons any sense of hindsight which would offer a sense of ease or predictability in the situation. Instead, the reader must experience the event with the same immediacy and uncertainty as the civilian observer. Through impressionist techniques of onomatopoeia and sparse diction, the text establishes how the psychic trauma of the civilian experience compares to the traumatic experiences of soldiers. Following the violence and trauma of the bomb raid, Macaulay employs the silencing of internal rhyming structures to convey the aftermath of a bomb raid and illustrate how the cataclysmic scale of war complicates grief for soldiers and civilians alike. In one rhyme, a line illustrates the entombing devastation of bomb damage, describing, “Last time they messed our square, and left it a hot rubbish-heap, / With people sunk in it so deep…” (68). The poem’s enclosed rhyme parallels the rhyme’s content, with the embedded completion of the rhyme mirroring how the homes and bodies of civilians are buried beneath heaps of rubble in the aerial raid’s aftermath. Also, the internal placement of the rhyme’s completion reflects the silencing effect of a rubble-heap. Without the aural emphasis or pronounced visibility of a placement at the end of the line, the rhyming pattern becomes less obvious, even potentially obscured by adjacent words. The dampening of internal rhymes evokes how the tremendous scale of bombing damage obstructs civilian grief. The metaphors and understatement of the aerial attack as a “show” or “shadow” of the experiences of soldiers reflect the helplessness felt by civilians and examines the difference between soldier and civilian experiences. The final unitalicized stanza of the poem concludes with the ironic understatement, “Tonight’s show begins, it seems” (68). The detached understatement of the line creates irony, juxtaposed against visceral images of the death and destruction wrought by the aerial attack. Additionally, the non-committal phrasing of “it seems” hints at further uncertainty. Though the night’s attacks have begun, the civilians are unable to anticipate the severity, timing, or duration of future attacks and are powerless to resist them. Moreover, the metaphor of the bombing as a “show” reinforces the helplessness of the civilians: like spectators attending a play or film, they are powerless to do anything but observe.
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