Bayonet Charge Flashcards
How emotion chages
The time sequence keeps changing along with her emotions. It goes from “Three days before” (line 1) to “Before you left” (line 3) to “After you’d gone” (line 23) to “later” (line 25) and the present in “this is where it has led me” on line 26. It ends with her suspended, on the hill, between the present and the past.
Rhythm
Like the form, the sounds of the poem are restrained. Rhyme would seem inappropriately lively.
The blazer
The colour and texture of the poppies is expressed through powerful language in the first stanza. The detailed description of the blazer is emphasised through alliteration on “bias binding… blazer”. We feel the closeness between mother and child the moment she kneels to pin the poppy to the lapel. In words such as “spasms”, “disrupting” and “blockade” however, she may be also recalling the violence of his death.
Imagery
This sense of her blocking out the memory of his violent death with a sweeter, purer memory is sustained in the second stanza: “Sellotape bandaged around my hand”. This image carries echoes of battlefield injury as well as cleaning the cat hairs off the blazer. The contrast between the death in battle and the domestic happiness (the boy has been cuddling his cat) is powerful.
Symbolic
In the third stanza, the language becomes metaphorical and symbolic. The door to the house is the door to the world. The song-bird is a metaphor for the mother setting the child free. This then changes into the dove, the symbol of peace – but here the peace the son has found is only the peace of death.
The son
The son leaving home for school on his own for the first time.
The son who has just been killed.
Beneath the surface the son dying violently in a field hospital in Afghanistan.
It is as if all these different versions of her son fixed exist together inside her. When the poem reaches a moment in the present (line 26) she is vulnerable, without protection. The final lines then go back to the past tense “I traced…”.
It is as if the present holds too much pain and her memories can only be expressed if distanced in imagery held safely in the past.
Compare to
Futility falling leaves
Structure
19 lines out of 35 have breaks in the middle of the lines - marked by commas or more strongly by full-stops. These breaks are called caesuras.
This careful variation in form suggests the inner emotion of a narrator who is trying to remain calm and composed but is breaking with sadness inside.
