Mametz Wood Flashcards
What main theme does Mametz Wood fall under?
War-> the problem of aestheticizing the horror of war
What year was Mametz Wood published?
2005
What is the plot of Mametz Wood?
-Reflects the conflict on a future generation and is based on a battle in WW1, where a shallow grave of 20 soldiers
What are the themes of Mametz Wood?
-The past
-Memory
-Guilt
-Forgetting
-Fragility-pity
What is the context of Mametz Wood?
-Response to a photograph of 20 dead WW1 soldiers in a shallow grave
-Welsh poet visits WW1 Somme battlefield of Welsh soldiers
-Sheers- ‘the strange juxtaposition of its natural present against its all too unnatural past’
What is the form & structure/ concepts of Mametz Wood?
-Tercets-> past, present, future
-Single stanza- land
-‘Pair’ of stanzas-> bones of soldiers
-Wastefulness/living impact/horror of the war
-Reflecting on the past
“the wasted young”
-teen soldiers
“A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade.”
-references to fragility-> evokes pity
“and broken bird’s egg of a skull.”
“broken birds”->fragile, body parts
“its nesting machine guns”
-oxymoron-> nest= natural
-> guns= unnatural
“a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm”
-oxymoron (broken/united)
