McKay refers to his own people as "kinsmen"; is this better than friends or comrades? Consider the denotation and connotation of "kinsmen".

This poem is a sonnet with 3 quatrains (lines of 4) and a couplet (set of lines), so in order to help your comprehension, you want to divide the stanzas by the structure.

Themes in poetry show up in the last lines or last stanza. A theme is a universal statement about what the author believes.

If we consider that poems are either a MEMORY or an EMOTION we can use word choice to figure out the theme. This poem is about emotion, particularly about not giving in to an enemy.

So universal theme would be...

symbolism - McKay calls his enemies "monsters", but he doesn't seem to be fighting fictional beasts in the poem, so not literal monsters.

simile (comparison using like or as) but what does this do to the text? What does this tell you about the motivations of the author?

Poetry 101:

Step 1 - Read this poem. Consider this just your first run through. Take notice of punctation (periods, comma, etc.). That's where you stop when reading a poem.

Step 2 - Read the poem again - But now you want to think in Costa's Level 2. So, notice rhetorical devices and what they are doing in the text. Divide your stanzas so you can chunk information and analyze in pieces.

Step 3 - Find the theme. Theme is a universal statement that tells us how the author feels about a topic. This is not a subject - like the beach - but what does the beach, or the setting, mean to the author. Themes are found in the last lines or the last stanza of a poem.

The world continues to change, warp, consume, ebb, and flow around us - good and bad directions.

So if we write a universal theme...

There seems to be someone with our author, and he calls them "love". So if we are wrapped up in the woes of life, can someone we love or having love save us?

It's easy to ignore the word "but"; however, this is a conjunction that tells you the author is about to flip everything they've been saying.

It's a tiny word with a major impact. So this is a good place to make a division in a poem. To see what was being established, and how the author now wants to change it.

Historical allusion to the Greek dramatist Sophocles. Can we connect this poem to something Sophocles wrote? Let's try an excerpt from Antigone:

"Happy are they whose life has not tasted evils. But for those whose house has been shaken by God, no mass of ruin fails to creep upon their families. It is like the sea-swell...when an undersea darkness drives upon it with gusts of Thracian wind; it rolls the dark sand from the depths, and the beaches, beaten by the waves and wind, groan and roar."

Thinking Costa Level 2, what misery can Arnold be contemplating on a moon blanched night at the beach?

Huh? That's a turn...