Mametz Wood - Owen Sheers Flashcards
tragedy - Mametz
“wasted young, turning up under plough blades” - due to the sheer amount of dead youth
Can’t forget the men who died
Wasted youth/tragic waste - loss of innocence
‘Broken mosaic of bone’
‘Broken bird’s egg of skull’
Nature - Mametz
nature was hurt with the loss of these men and they try to return back to nature.
“tended the land back into itself” - trying desperately to get rid of the memory but it wont leave
The bodies do not belong in the mass grave “wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin”
“the earth stands sentinel” feeling responsibility for these boys
Irresponsibility - Mametz
fatal orders from those in charge - careless as it didnt affect them directly
“they were told to walk, not run”
“nesting machine guns” - nature
Morbid - Mametz
“their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre” - medieval idea - dance of death. Allegory for the universality of death - all the men are united in their death, no matter who they were in their life. Joy associated with the dance contrasts the bleak image of hoplessness, the death and dread
Destruction - Mametz
“In boots that outlasted them”
puts it into perspective. War was built to last and the men are viewed as disposable. People aren’t meant for fighting.
Forgotten - Mametz
“absent tongues” - but have been unearthed and rediscovered, giving them a sense of justice/a new lease of life - nothing can give them enough though
Disturbing - Mametz
“their jaws, those that have them”
realism of the destruction and violence these men experienced at the hands of those in power.
Delicate - “broken bird’s egg of a skull” “china plate”, fragility of seemingly strong men.
“chit of bone” “broken mosaic” - scattered around in many places
Context - Mametz
- Sheers visited the site of the battle of Somme on the 85th anniversary of it
- 4000 men from the 38th welsh division died in the battle of Somme
- Sheers is Welsh
- Sheers was inspired by a photo of a mass grave
Structure- Mametz
Structurally, the first stanza is a kind of general introduction to the poem’s main subject, while the second reads like an itemized list of gruesome Mametz Wood discoveries. Stanzas three and four deal more with nature’s relationship to the conflict, likening nature to a wounded soldier.
The final three stanzas discuss yet another discovery, this time of twenty men buried in a mass grave. The poem ends by imagining that unearthing these skeletons has allowed “the notes they had sung” to finally be released, and perhaps some peace has returned to the land.
The poem is written in the past tense throughout, which gives it a sense of linking back across the years to the original conflict. As the same time, the poem still reads as if written from a contemporary vantage point (as indicated by the phrases like “now” and “This morning”). This also helps emphasize the sheer amount of body parts in the soil: they are still being discovered almost a century later.
