Imagery and sound

Imagery

Picture courtesy of Daniel Brooks
The opening lines of the poem are dark. The 'greyness' (line 1) is heightened by the heavy alliteration 'in drizzle of one despondent dawn' (line 2) and even the approaching 'sunbreak' (line 4) does not lift the atmosphere.
Picture courtesy of Daniel Brooks
There are metaphors of horror and death: the 'dead tree' (line 6) branch on which the vultures are roosting is described as a 'broken bone' (line 5), while the male vulture's bashed-in head is a 'pebble on a stem' (line 9) and its body is a 'dump of gross feathers' (line 11).
Picture courtesy of Austin Huff Robison
In the second section, the vultures' affection leads the poet on to muse about the nature of love. Love is personified as a woman finding a place to sleep. She is 'in other ways so particular' (line 23) and hard to please, yet, strangely, she chooses to sleep with the vultures, 'that charnel house' (line 26). Yet why does love sleep with 'her face turned to the wall' (line 28)?
One Nazi soldier saluting another
We see the 'Belsen Commandant' - a mass murderer - as Daddy. Why does Achebe use a child's name for him rather than 'father'?
Picture Courtesy of Steven Indra
In the fourth section, the poet again uses metaphors: the evil Commandant is 'an ogre' (line 43) with merely a spark of love - 'a tiny glow-worm tenderness' (line 44) in the 'icy caverns of a cruel heart' (line 46). These are fairly clichéd images, perhaps because Achebe wanted to suggest that what he is describing is nothing new: there will always be love and evil in the world.
Picture courtesy of Marco Masciovecchio
The 'germ' (line 48) of love does not seem to grow as a normal seed would because the 'perpetuity of evil' (line 50) is bound up with it and prevents it from developing. (Think of wheat germ rather than disease-carrying germs.)