Beat! Beat! Drums! Themes

Even though our speaker never actually mentions it, "Beat! Beat! Drums!" is a poem about the American Civil War. Sure, we don't see images of battlefields and flying bullets, but what do get are th...

Death sneaks up on us in "Beat! Beat! Drums!" The first nineteen lines focus on the living, and then suddenly, in the final verses, we're confronted with the image of the dead under their shrouds,...

The rhythm of "Beat! Beat! Drums!" already gives us a feeling of order and structure. Heck, even the title sounds orderly! But the speaker of this poem provides this sense of order just to have it...

In "Beat! Beat! Drums!" we get a nice glimpse into the lives of American people. In the eyes of our speaker, the United States is a land made up of scholars, church-goers, and people who are used t...