I found “At the Somme: The Song of Mud” by Mary Borden to exhibit the way that a woman saw the war by experiencing war theater different from the home front poems like “A War Bride” by Jessie St. John. The home front poem is disconnected from the war. St. John writes, “what shall I do today,” in the first line of the poem. The war bride of the poem wonders how to feel her day, and sees the absence of men.

           Strikingly the men are viscerally present in Borden’s poem. There is mud, blood, death, and the struggle of war immediate in Borden’s work. Borden writes, "of mud-the obscene, the filthy, the putrid,
The vast liquid grave of our armies," (31-32). Comparing these two poems makes the line between the home front and the war front stark and well-defined. The similarity is that these poems are written not as combat experiences, but as women confined to clearly defined roles in the war.