Fold him in his country's stars. Roll the drum and fire the volley! What to him are all our wars, What but death bemocking folly?

The speaker calls for a soldier’s burial: the body is wrapped in the national flag (“his country’s stars”), accompanied by the ritual sounds of military honor (“Roll the drum and fire the volley”). Yet the stanza pivots from ceremony to disillusion. For the dead man, the causes and clamor of conflict have become irrelevant; war is reduced to “death bemocking folly,” a bitter phrase suggesting that death exposes the vanity, repetition, and self-deception of human violence. The lines thus hold two truths in tension—patriotic reverence for sacrifice and a grim recognition that, from the grave’s perspective, political passions and martial glory collapse into tragic absurdity.