My soul looked down from a vague height with Death,
As unremembering how I rose or why,
And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,
Grey, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,
And fitted with great pocks and scabs of plagues.
Across its beard, that horror of harsh wire,
There moved thin caterpillars, slowly uncoiled.
It seemed they pushed themselves to be as plugs
Of ditches, where they writhed and shrivelled, killed.
The wire is personified, with a ‘beard’. This may be a reference to the effect of explosives on barbed wire, which couldn’t be destroyed, but was blown into the air and fell untidily, a terrible death trap for any soldier who found himself entangled in it. 
