The theme of "The Gift in Wartime" is to mourn the sadness and futility of lives lost in war. In the poem, the speaker, who has to faced the death of her beloved husband in a war, speaks directly to him, contrasting what she has offered and what she received. 

In the poem, many figurative speech such as irony, imagery, anaphora, apostrophe are used. Irony takes place when the poet talks about the gift which is not a real gift but is infact grief and loss and sorrow. A grave and shrapnel as tokens of remembrance are not the types of gifts people truly want. Through all these, the speaker portrays her beloved's "gift" of death has robbed her youth. The poet uses imagery when roses are offered in her beloved's grave, and her husband is described as as a corpse with lips with no smile and eyes with no sight.The red roses symbolizes love. The next figure of speech includes anaphora, which is the repetition of the same words at the beginning of a line. In the first, third and fifth stanzas, the poet repeats "I offer you". The anaphora comes in the sixth stanza when the speaker repeats "you give me" three times in a row. The poem also uses the method of apostrophe, which is direct address to a person who is not present or to an inanimate object. Here, the speaker addresses her husband’s dead body. The poet makes use of metaphor as she compares her sadness to the clouds in her eyes on a summer day.