The article contains a linguistic and stylistic analysis of two poems by V. V. Mayakovsky, representing the author's poetic reaction to the beginning of the First World War – “The War is Declared” and “Mother and the Evening Killed by the Germans” (1914). These works have several features in common, including the ring structure, word and sound repetitions, wordplay, neologisms, epithets, similar techniques of personification, metaphorization, contrast, deconstruction of idioms and nonce words coined by Mayakovsky. The idea of the horrors of war is conveyed by the author through the words that create semantic fields “Death”, “Murder” and “Ugliness” in the literary text, as well as through the actualization of sound and color semantics. To visualize the image of death white, black, red, yellow and blue colors are used with the predominance of red shades (crimson, red, burning, etc.). Red is also associated with images of deformity, injury and suffering cripples (draw blood, tattered, scraps of human meat, mangled, stump, break fingers, legless, armless, killed, etc.). Sound associations are created by incorporating lexemes semantics of which represents a whole range of auditory signals from silent whisper of a dying man to a raging scream of a victim (to mumble, to beg, to cry, to burst into tears, to clink, to сlatter, a ring, to shout, to scream, savage scream, rumbling voice, bass, rumbling, straining, etc.) in the verbal fabric of the text. In the background of these semantic fields temporal and spatial images (evening, new moon, Russia – West) are activated, bearing a symbolic character.