Need Help With a Peotry Essay

Here's an example of a simple transitional sentence for the end of body paragraph one: Whether alive or dead, the soldier in each poem is affected by his environment.

In this sentence, I refer to the subject/main idea of the first paragraph (the soldier/alive or dead), while joining it to the subject of body paragraph two.  It wraps up the point of the body paragraph by joining together the ideas.  It previews the subject of the next body paragraph.   Most importantly, it builds the argument by connecting the subject for the second body paragraph to the first.