After Blenheim " After Blenheim " is an anti - war poem written by English Romantic poet laureate Robert Southey in 1796 ( see 1796 in poetry ) . The poem is set at the site of the Battle of Blenheim ( 1704 ) , with the questions of small children about a skull one of them has found . An old man tells two small children of burned homes , civilian casualties , and rotting corpses , while repeatedly calling it " a famous victory " . Story . Old Kaspar has finished his work and is sitting in the sun in front of the cottage , watching his little granddaughter at play . Peterkin , his grandson , has been rolling a hard round object he found near the stream . He brings it to the old man , who explains " ' Tis some poor fellow ' s skull , " said he ( line 17 – 18 ) . He admits that he often finds them while ploughing in the garden ( line 22 – 18 ) . The children anticipate a story — " And little Wilhelmine looks up / with wonder - waiting eyes " ( ln 26 – 27 ) . Kaspar explains to the children the story of the battle , that the Duke of Marlborough routed the French , although he admits he never understood the reason for the war himself . He also mentions that his father had a cottage by the rivulet — " My father lived at Blenheim then " — where Peterkin found the skull . The soldiers burned it to the ground , and his father and mother had fled , with their child . The following verse refers to a " childing " mother , or a mother with child ( ln 45 – 46 ) and many of them died with their newborns , possibly alluding to his own mother . 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 . Criticism . While Southey ' s verse , " After Blenheim " , is considered an anti - war poem , arguably Southey was not himself anti - war : Byron himself considered Southey a puzzle : one 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 . 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 : " After Blenheim " , also called " Battle of Blenheim " , was written during Southey ' s Jacobin years ( roughly 17901800 ) . In a letter to Charles Collins , Esquire , he wrote of traveling through Woodstock in the summer of 1793 , and of refusing to even turn his head to look at the walls of the palace , built by Marlborough , and named for the battle . He wrote the poem , sometimes considered by critics as the most celebrated of British anti - war poems , while living at Westbury with his mother and his cousin ( Peggy ) in a renovated ale - house , which he shared also with a " great carroty cat " . It appeared in publication with several others , in the category of " Ballads and metrical tales " , with the revenge tale of " Lord William , " and the narrative " Queen Oracca . " By 1820 , however , Southey had changed his mind about the Battle , describing it instead as the most brilliant moment in British arms . The fate of Germany , had it not been won , he calculated , might have over set the Protestant Succession in Britain .