And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
 For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
 Moving their sweet limbs
 Quick, quick, to music,
 But there on the shining shield
 His hands had set no dancing-floor
 But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
 That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
The figure of the ‘ragged urchin’ is introduced, ‘aimless and alone’.  It suggests poverty and child abandonment, the outcome of brutality and war.
The Shield of Achilles