Mametz Wood

Question 1

Themes

Answer 1

Time
Nature
Conflict
Places
Death/Grief/Loss

Question 2

Context

Answer 2

Owen Sheers was born in Fiji and raised in Wales. He writes about places and landscapes with a focus on the people within them, and the struggle of simply trying to live.

Question 3

Themes of Time

Answer 3

He looks at the scars on the land, created by past conflict and the decomposition of the dead soldiers over time, and how the world moves on but people don’t forget.

Question 4

Quotes about Time

Answer 4

• “For years after the farmers found them”
• “the wasted young”
• “even now the earth stands sentinel”
• “reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened”
• “this morning”
• “their skeletons paused”
• “in boots that outlasted them”

Question 5

Themes of Nature

Answer 5

He talks about weaponry nestled within nature, where the war took place. And he personifies the land somewhat as he described the psychical and emotional scarring, still profound today.

Question 6

Quotes about Nature

Answer 6

• “turning up under their plight blades as they tended the land back into itself”
• “broken birds egg of a skull”
• “walk not run towards the wood and it’s nesting machine guns”
• “even now the earth stands sentinel”
• “reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened”
• “like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin”

Question 7

Themes of Conflict

Answer 7

Talks about the profound impact of war on the land and the young men who died, with emphasis on their youth.

Question 8

Quotes about Conflict

Answer 8

• “the wasted young”
• “a chit of bone, the China plate of a shoulder blade”
• “the relic of a finger”
• “all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white”
• “across this field where they were told to walk not run”
• “twenty men buried in one long grave”
• “a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm”
• “their skeletons paused mid dance macabre”
• “in boots in outlasted”
• “their socketed heads tilted back at an angle”
• “their jaws, those who have them, dropped open”
• “as if the notes they had sung have only now with this unearthing slipped from their absent tongues”

Question 9

Themes of Places

Answer 9

It’s set upon a battle ground, Mametz Wood but after the war has occurred, so there has been some time to heal

Question 10

Quotes about Places

Answer 10

• “for years afterwards the farmers found them”
• “tended the land back into itself”
• “across this field where they were told to walk not run”
• “earth stands sentinel”
• “reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened”
• “twenty men buried in one long grave”

Question 11

Ideas about Death

Answer 11

He talks about the young soldiers who died at war, he tries to emphasise their age and how their lives have been wasted as a result of conflict, and the land out lives them

Question 12

Quotes about Death

Answer 12

• “the wasted young”
• “the china plate of a shoulder blade”
• “the relic of a finger”
• “across this field where they were told to walk, not run”
• “twenty men buried in one long grave”
• “their skeletons paused mid dance-macarbre
• “in boots that outlasted them”
• “absent tongues”

Question 13

Structure

Answer 13

Split into 7 stanzas, could possibly reflect a broken bone.
Could also display how the broken land has to come back together and heal, the “reaching back into itself” line is the middle of the poem and shows how time is always at the centre of everything.
Time changes in each stanza from “twenty years” “even now” “this morning”