In it, Levertov contemplated the lives of the victims of the war (specifically the Vietnamese, who directly suffered from the war), providing a comparison of their lives as war victims and what might have been their lives had the war not happened. The main idea of the poem, of course, was to demonstrate how war destroys life-how war makes people lose everything, and gain nothing, in their lives.

             The poem's narrative is structured into three: (1) Levertov's contemplation of the possible lives of the Vietnamese could have had if the War did not happen, (2) the lives of the Vietnamese prior to experiencing the war, and (3) the lives of the Vietnamese after the war. Comparing these different kinds of Vietnamese life showed how war and social injustice pervaded Vietnamese society-how, in the absence of war, social injustice prevailed in the form of poverty. The only difference between war and social injustice is that suffering and destruction of life happens at a more rapid pace during war than the latter (i.e., occurrence and prevalence of social injustice in the society).

             In the first stanza of the poem, Levertov illustrated through effective imagery his own description of Vietnamese society as a pseudo-paradise, a society full of mystery, virgin, and undisturbed: "Did they hold ceremonies to reverence the opening of buds?.Did they use bone and ivory, jade and silver, for ornament?.Had they an epic poem?" These lines evoke the loss of the opportunity to get to know Vietnamese culture better, and this lost opportunity was caused by the war that America has declared against Vietnam (technically, only to North Vietnam, but inevitably and as expected, suffering included all of the Vietnamese people). The next stanza highlighted the radical change in the lives of the people who lost their loved ones and country from the war: "Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.