The unlucky soldier in line 11, sighs, possibly his last breath whose blood then will run down the walls of government. The sigh is a softer sound than the sounds that are heard elsewhere in the poem. The sigh is faint, because the dying soldier is far away in foreign lands, sacrificing his youth for the monarchal state. This image ties London with the whole world, like this small poem letting it’s ideas break beyond it’s immediate scope of London’s darkness, and shows it has no bounds. And even so the sigh is still powerful enough that it manifests it’s presence in the Palace as blood running down a wall, suggesting the biblical image “the writing is on the wall