Yehuda Amichai wrote this poem son after the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, Israel won the war, but at great cost, both economically and many human lives were taken. Yehuda uses incremental repetition by doing slight variations in wording; it affects the meaning of the poem by constantly going back to specific words, which gives them more meaning. “is all this sorrow” is repeated constantly throughout the poem. Then, it is answered in the last stanza, “how long can we build the land, to gain in the terrible, three-sided game of building, consolation, and death? Yes, all this is sorrow.”
In his poetry Mr. Amichai often wrote about love and loss and, in recent years, about aging and mortality, all of it linked by his gift for poeticizing the particular: the localized object or image in everyday life. From his point of view, the role of a poet was ''to name each thing, each feeling, each experience, plainly and accurately, without pretense.''