“there’s no place for us, my dear”
The speaker, Stanza 1, line 3 (the first refrain)
The first refrain sets up the whole poem. The city has just been described as holding ten million people, the rich and the poor alike, so the claim that there is “no place” for two more is shocking in its arithmetic. The word “place” means both a home and a position in society, and the refugees are denied both. The endearment softens the statement into something said privately, which is the pattern of every refrain: the terrible news is shared between the two, never shouted.
“Old passports”
The speaker, Stanza 3, line 9
The third stanza sets a churchyard yew, which renews itself every spring, against the refugees' documents, which cannot be renewed at all. The contrast suggests that nature allows a second life while the state does not. The yew grows among graves, so the image can be read as quietly anticipating the consul's verdict in the next stanza: the refugees are being treated like people already among the dead.
“If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead”
The consul, Stanza 4, line 11
The consul's verdict is the bluntest line in the poem, and the adverb is what makes it chilling. The word “officially” turns death into a matter of paperwork: the state does not need to kill the refugees if it can simply decline to recognise them. The casual, spoken rhythm of the line (you’ve got, you’re) makes the judgement sound routine, as though he says it every day. Learn it exactly, contractions included.
“we are still alive”
The speaker, Stanza 4, line 12 (the refrain)
The refrain's answer to the consul is simple and defiant: a plain statement of fact against an official fiction. But it is spoken to the companion, not to the consul, which suggests the refugees have no right of reply in the room. Repeated within the line, the words sound less like a victory than like something the two of them must keep saying in order to go on believing it.
“Asked me politely to return next year”
The speaker, describing the committee, Stanza 5, line 14
The committee's courtesy is the irony of the stanza. The word “politely” marks almost the only kindness anyone in the poem shows the refugees, and it achieves nothing, because “next year” is useless to people with nowhere to go now. The refrain that follows is the only one in the poem that ends with a question mark, asking where they can go today, which exposes the gap between the committee's timetable and the refugees' emergency.
“they will steal our daily bread”
The speaker at the public meeting, Stanza 6, line 17
The public speaker's warning uses the economic fear of the Depression years: refugees as rivals for jobs and food. The phrase “daily bread” echoes the Lord's Prayer, so, on one reading, he dresses his prejudice in the language of Christian piety, which makes it the more hypocritical. His pronouns split the world into “we” and “they”, and the refrain answers by making the faceless “they” personal again: the man meant “you and me”.
“They must die”
Hitler, as the speaker hears him, Stanza 7, line 20
Three words, and the most brutal in the poem. The speaker first takes the sound for thunder, so Hitler's threat arrives like a force of nature rolling over the whole continent. The flat, three-word sentence has no reason attached, which is the point: it is a sentence of death on a whole people. Written in the same year as Hitler's Reichstag threat of January 1939, it records a fear rather than a prophecy.
“they weren’t German Jews”
The speaker, Stanza 8, line 24 (the refrain)
After a pampered poodle and a cat allowed indoors, the refrain gives the reason the animals are treated better than the refugees. It is the first time the poem names who the speakers are, and it names them as the category that has been refused. The bitter comedy of the image, a pampered pet preferred to a human being, shows how completely the refugees have been dehumanised.
“Only ten feet away”
The speaker, Stanza 9, line 27 (the refrain)
Standing on the quay, the speaker watches fish swimming freely in the harbour, and the refrain measures the distance to that freedom: tiny, and impassable. The harbour is where a ship might take them to safety, so the image can also be read as a picture of the sea routes that were closed to refugees. This is the shortest refrain in the poem, and its brevity makes the distance feel even more tormenting.
“Looking for you and me”
The speaker, Stanza 12, line 36 (the final refrain)
The poem ends with the couple being hunted. Ten thousand soldiers are set against two people, and the plain words make the image more frightening, not less. The phrase repeats the “you and me” of the public-meeting stanza, so the private refrain that has named the couple throughout now names them as targets. There is no resolution: the last line is a search still going on.