bayonet charge

Question 1

context

Answer 1

• Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire, in the North of England, and grew up in the countryside.
• themes of countryside, human history and mythology already deeply influenced his imagination by the time he started writing poetry as a student.

Question 2

who was ted hughes

Answer 2

He was poet laureate from 1984 until his death from cancer in 1998.

Question 3

form and structure

Answer 3

• 3 stanzas
• first stanza about action and running.
• flow broken by the use of dashes “–” shows how the soldier is waking up to what is happening and slowly starting to think.
• The second stanza therefore happens in a kind of slow-motion
• the second half of line 15 caesura shows he knows he has to rush, without thinking, towards his death in the final stanza.

Question 4

sound

Answer 4

Hughes uses a dense repetition of words and sounds right from the beginning. in stanza one he uses the repeated ‘h’ sound that expresses the soldier’s heavy breathing.

Question 5

imagery; hell

Answer 5

-“sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest”brings sense of hell to the battlefield.

Question 6

imagery; nature

Answer 6

-Throughout poem have a background of farming and the natural world: “stumbling across a field of clods towards a green hedge” threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flame”. The hare, however, becomes an image of death.

Question 7

repetition of “raw”

Answer 7

repetition, inter-textual link to Wilfred Owen poem “spring offensive”, shows how Hughs cannot express horrors of war with one poem, highlights impossibility of describing horrors of war

Question 8

“belly”

Answer 8

childish/ positive connotations juxtaposes horrors of war