The second stanza contrasts women’s acute awareness of inequality with the majority’s lack of awareness because not one of the purple host(in this case the phrase refers to a large army, and the color purple indicates either an association with royalty, an exuberant pride or nationalism) could describe the concept of victory even though they were taking up the flag for the king or country. Here we see the army is unaware of its cause; it is unaware of the meaning of the word victory. However, in the previous stanza, and in the third stanza, we can see that women clearly understand the definition of victory because, as stated in the third stanza, she will die before she attains victory. We can untangle this slightly paradoxical notion of understanding those things that are far away from us best, by thinking about seeing a large game in play: when viewed from up close, we can only see the game pieces.