Bayonet Charge Flashcards
“Suddenly he awoke and was running- raw”
We begin in media res
- ‘raw’- this is a dramatic opening and it gives the authors point of view that war is like an unnatural awakening and that normal life has suddenly become something completely different. Our normal lives that the author tries to imply is like a dream and that the soldier is awakened from that dream because he is suddenly in the middle of a war and this experience is ‘raw’.
- the structural repetition and enjambment of raw gives the idea of how painful war is emotionally as well as physically
Raw is also a homophone which sounds like the sound roar and gives us the idea of the noise of raw that suddenly wakes him up from this dream of normal life and terror
He contrasts war with the way of life, one way he does this is the verb, ‘running’ and has the ides of true speed however that is contrasted with the fact that this sentence doesn’t end for ages- enjambment- gives the poem a kind of breathlessness which mimics the breath of the soldiers as he’s running either towards certain death or escape
“In a raw-seamed hot khaki, his sweat heavy,”
- “raw-seamed”- adjective, the things that are supposed to protect him as turning against him so how the ‘khaki’ is the material of his uniform but that itself has become hot as its attacking him along all the seams and the seams and the seams are making his skin raw, the rawness of the skin is literal and metaphorical so in a literal sense, where the flees would be, the life. So soldiers used to burn off the lice from the clothing and they’d find them in the seams. A metaphors term would be that raw backwards is ‘war’. It is war that has caused this rawness and for the things that are supposed to be protecting him are turning against him.
-‘sweat heavy’ - the idea of heaviness means weight hes so desperate to escape that even the weight of his own sweat is slowing him down.
-enjambment- It also conveys his fear, it is slowing down time with the constant enjambment.
Mimics the fact that this charge was taking too long from the soldiers perspective, that he’s trapped in time exposed and about to be shot at any time
“Bullets smacking the belly out of the air-”
- Alliteration of ‘bullets’ and ‘belly’- comical imagery, personification that the air has got a belly and the comedy conveys that the soldiers feelings of relief and amusement that he isn’t being killed by the bullet, instead they are making a ‘smacked belly sound’, which gives a level of irony as if it smacks his belly, he then dies whereas the air suffers nothing.
“He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm”
Portrays that the damage being done to the air is like the damage that will be done to himself, simile- ‘as a smashed arm’.
-‘numb’- reflects his feelings at the minute as at the moment of charging he’s not able to experience his own feelings he needs to suppress them. So that’s why he has a comic image of bullets smacking the belly of the air.
-idea of time slowing down- ‘lugged’ ‘numb’ conveys the urgency the soldier has in his mind compared to the slowness of which he is moving- just like the rifle is like a smashed arm it is also slowing him down
Form of the poem
There isn’t a proper pattern
Plays with ‘iambic’ rhythm and ‘trochaic’ rhythm
Iambic- second syllable is accented
Trochaic- first syllable is accented
Has the effect of disconnecting, not a natural rhythm to the poem just as there isn’t a natural rhythm to this man’s run, he can’t escape quickly enough.
“In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations was he the hand pointing that second?
- a question that demands an answer in the middle of his run so as he has stopped running and is pausing where he can be killed, however he still is running so this question comes to him in a moment of stillness in his own mind while his body is still furiously moving.
This is in the middle of the poem where he introduces his main idea and all the soldiers main idea.
-“cold”- suggests an unfeeling god or an h fleeing fate at work that does not care about the suffering of the soldiers-
-begins here by blaming god and fate but immediately moves to ‘and the nations’ so it shows how the politicians and patriotisms are contributing to that fate by buying into the propaganda of politics, probably joined up patriotically and now realising that was a foot kiss thing to do so he’s exposing himself to death for no purpose.
-‘was he the hand pointing that second’- get a sense of no purpose with this metaphor he is imaging that every second, a new life has been expunged(removed). Also suggests that death is unstoppable and it is a ‘cold clockwork’ that is being wound up and he can’t escape the consequences. This also physically shows the image of the recruitment poster from WW1 asking young men to go to war.
“Threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flame and crawled in a threshing circle, it’s mouth wide”
He is now noticing his surroundings and now starting to see the world in a different way.
What is being described with verbs conveys fast movement however what’s being described is slow-‘threshing’ ‘crawled’ ‘rolling’. This hare is exposing itself to death just like the soldier. This hare is a symbol of the soldier himself.
In popular culture, ‘hare’ is seen as faster which conveys the soldiers madness and contrasts between the speed at which he needs to move the speed he is actually moving in is still being exposed.
“King, honour, human dignities, etcetera dropped like luxuries”
Contrast in speed where all these enormous ideas are dropped really quickly in contrast to the solider running to escape bullets and the hare is moving quickly but moving nowhere. So war is left with Judy the most basic nature and everything else is stripped from us.
It also shows how all the things that influenced him to join war has ‘dropped like luxuries’- social construct
-‘etcetera’ suggests that these things are actually ridiculous and they seem that they’re something important but aren’t - life and living is important not the artificial social constructs.
“His terror touchy dynamite”
Suggests that his own terror is going to explode and kill him which leads into an irrational act- charges to a machine gun, or might signify an internal explosion, the metaphor might mean that his mind is being dynamited and can no longer think straight.
-‘touchy’ something that we associate with a persons feelings so ted Hughes’s is dealing with the feelings of the soldier after the war. It suggests that this is how his father is still sensitive to that terror years after the war has passed, now the poem has become not only just a moment frozen in the war he is trying to get out of, it is the reliving of that moment that he is trying to escape. So it invites us to imagine that the soldier after the war is still a victim of the terror and is still the ‘dynamite’, we can also see it as an anger to the social construction and how they keep doing this
