Comparison - Manhunt and Mametz Wood Flashcards
What are the things similar about Manhunt and Mametz Wood?
- theme of War
- show impacts of war
- reconnection and rediscovery with the past and about an event/experience
- fragmented structure
What are the things different about Manhunt and Mametz Wood?
- Name of battle
- Imagery of war and death
How is the theme of War similar in Manhunt and Mametz Wood?
Manhunt:
- Based on Eddie Beddoes by his wife Laura and changes when he comes back from war
Mametz Wood:
- About the soldiers who died in the forgotten Battle of Somme in 1961 in WWI
How is the impact of War similar in Manhunt and Mametz Wood?
- Both poets present the awful legacy of war and the psychological impact it has either on its tsurvivors.
What are the quotes supporting the idea of the impact of War in Manhunt and Mametz Wood?
Manhunt:
- ‘Manhunt’ - Title means an intensive search for a person such as a criminal or a victim who’s been kidnapped = negative connotations and set the mood for a horrible story
- frozen river which ran through his face’ - Makes the soldier sound inoperative – river can shatter but can’t move
- ‘Intimate days’ – makes them sound intimate
- ‘buried deep in his mind’ - – links to the idea of PTSD and – war had emotional, mental and physical impacts
Mametz Wood
- ‘For years afterwards the farmers found them’ - - for years after shows that the impact of war is long lasting and found them shows that the soldiers are passive and them shows that they are anonymous as they don’t have a specific identity any longer (made soldiers powerless)
- This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave’ - - the adverbial phrase his morning shows the effect of war is still being felt today
- ‘in boots that outlasted them’- repetition of t,k,b,d,g sounds mimic the sounds of the machine gun fire cause the heads of the soldiers to be titled back war is so powerful it forces its way into poetry
- ‘have only now, with this unearthing’ - unearthing shows that we need to acknowledge the atrocities of war to move on from them
- ‘slipped from their absent tongues’- absent and slipped shows that the soldiers and passive and powerless again
How is the reconnection and rediscovery with the past and about an event/experience similar in Manhunt and Mametz Wood?
Both poems are about reconnection and rediscovery with the past and written about an experience
What are the quotes supporting the idea of reconnection and rediscovery with the past and about an event/experience in Manhunt and Mametz Wood?
Manhunt:
•‘porcelain collar bone’ - Delicate and beautiful = Shows that relationships are fragile and care is needed to rebuild them
•‘only then did I come close’- Emotional distance and detachment caused by war
•‘he let me trace’ - He gave her permission and shows that she can also feel his hurt and empathise with him
•‘only then could I picture a scan’- Imagery of a child – connections to their own child
•‘trace’- Verb shows that she is analysing his body and exploring his slowly – is he not the person she knew before
•‘bind the struts’- As his wife she is trying to put him together
Mametz Wood:
•‘across this field where they were told to walk, not run’ - tone is critical and seems like he is mocking them to the people in charge of the 38th division due to poor leadership that had caused many deaths
•‘And even now the earth stands sentinel’- sentinel is a type of guard whose jobs it is to stand and keep watch = shows the Earth is protecting the soldiers but is fairly inactive as it won’t fight alongside
- ‘the wasted young, turning up under their plough blade’- wasted shows a critical tone towards war
- ‘Reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened’ - euphemistic and vague tone shows the atrocities of war are too terrible to think about
How is the fragmented structure similar in Manhunt and Mametz Wood?
Manhunt:
• ‘the parachute silk of his punctured lung’ and ‘damaged porcelain collar-bone’ - Show the fragility of human life using metaphors
• ‘phrase’ and ‘days’ - Half and full rhyme
• The structure shows the fragment and recovery of the soldier
• Focusing on one part of the body at a time de humanises the soldier
• Line length contrasts with each other = esp 15 and 16
• Lack of proper rhyme scheme and uses ‘and’ to drag the continuous process of healing
Mametz Wood:
•‘the broken bird’s egg of a skull’ and ‘the china plate of a shoulder blade’ - Also shows the fragility of human life
•’in boots that outlasted them’ -Extreme pathos and sympathy is created
•’for years after the farmers found them’ - Use of alliteration
•’socketed heads tilted back at an angle’ - use of onomatopoeia - sounds of the machine guns which shot them down
•‘ like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin’ - Longer lines that break up the neat form of the poem = sticks out = chaotic like the ploughed fields with chits of bones sticking out
•‘a chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade’ - - ‘ch’ sounds and assonance of o sound draw attention to the destruction
- overall calm pace
How is the name of the battle different in Manhunt and Mametz Wood?
Manhunt:
•‘Only then did I come close’ = - written in first person about a wife whose husband returned from Bosnia where he served as a peacekeeper
- about the Bosnian War
Mametz Wood:
•‘twenty men buried in one long grave’ - - Written by Sheers about 90 years after the Battle of Somme in 3rd person
How is the imagery of war and death different in Manhunt and Mametz Wood?
Manhunt looks deeply at the imagery of war, which Mametz Wood looks at the gore and uses horrible imagery of war but also looks at death
What are the quotes supporting differences in the imagery of war and death in Manhunt and Mametz Wood?
Manhunt:
- ‘blown hinge’ - total destruction
•The parachute silk - military reference
•The foetus of metal behind his chest - Metaphor for a bullet and ties life to death = juxtaposition (similar to Sheers writing ‘the broken bird’s egg of a skull’)
•Unexploded mine- Shows him as a time bomb so he is suffering internally
Mametz Wood:
- ‘like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin’ -strange yet interesting images
- ‘mid-dance macabre’, ‘socketed heads tilted back at an angle’- Horrific images are created
- ‘blown and broken bird’s egg of a skull’ - Plosive alliteration – mimics the sound of gunfire and explosions on the battlefield. Zoomorphism associates a sense of delicacy with the soldiers – some only boys.
- ‘socketed heads tilted back’ - Gives imagery of their heads when they are shot with bullets with a simple work such as tilted. It shows it was a normal thing to them. The word socketed shows that the bullets fit into them perfectly as if they were meant to die.
- ‘their jaws, those that have them, dropped open’ - embedded clause emphasises the devastation of war and the imagery shows how brutal and wasteful war was
