<P> Thousands of corpses lay rotting in the fields, but he shrugs it off, as part of the cost of war (ln 53--54). Wilhelmine says it was a wicked thing, but he contradicts her, no, he says, it was a great victory . The poem is a scathing commentary on "man's cruelty to man". </P> <P> While Southey's verse, After Blenheim, is considered by some an anti-war poem, arguably Southey was not himself anti-war: Byron himself considered Southey a puzzle: on the one hand, he denigrated the English victory at Blenheim, but praised the Battle of Waterloo in The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo, a popular poem that generated £ 215 in two months of publication . </P> <P> It is one of Southey's most famous poems . The internal repetition of but' twas a famous victory juxtaposed with the initial five lines of each stanza, establish that the narrator does not know why the battle was fought, why thousands died, why his father's cottage was burned . The often - quoted closing lines are: </P> <Table> <Tr> <Td> "</Td> <Td> <P> "But what good came of it at last?" Quoth little Peterkin . "Why that I cannot tell," said he, "But' twas a famous victory ." </P> </Td> <Td>" </Td> </Tr> </Table>

Why is after blenheim an anti war poem