Mametz Wood (owen Sheers) Flashcards
“The wasted young, turning up under their plough blades”
adjective “wasted” = brutal judgement → youth lost meaninglessly
• agricultural metaphor = death unearthed in a cycle of life
• irony = plough brings food but also reveals trauma
Sheers immediately presents the war as a long-buried horror resurfacing, shattering peace with past violence.
“A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade”
metaphor “chit” = small, fragile scrap → anonymity, youth
• simile “china plate” = delicate beauty vs grotesque reality - fragile, should be carefully protected but can easily be broken
• consonance “ch” = softness, tragic tone
caesura comma - splits the body parts up
Sheers contrasts the fragility of the human body with the violence that shattered it.
“The blown / and broken bird’s egg of a skull”
• alliteration = fragile, lyrical sound → innocence destroyed - contrasts violence of war
• metaphor “bird’s egg” = natural, unborn potential
• violent verbs “blown” + “broken” = traumatic rupture
Sheers mourns the shattered potential of young lives, comparing them to nature’s lost beginnings.
“Across this field where they were told to walk, not run,”
• imperative “told” = loss of agency → blind obedience
• irony = order to walk into danger
• setting = calm field now stained with history
Context - the plan Field Marshall Haig had - supposedly they would have an advantage if they walked towards the Germans - willingness and obedience of welsh soldiers & cruelty of men in charge
“Like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.”
• simile = battlefield = open wound → trauma trying to heal - continues personification of injured earth
• imagery of resurfacing = memory, history, physical remains
• violent tone = war is embedded in the land
Foreign body - they died in a foreign land - bones don’t belong, earth doesn’t want to carry the burden, wants to set them free
Sheers uses the image of a healing wound to show how war cannot be buried—it resurfaces in unexpected ways.
O “Their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre”
metaphor “dance-macabre” = medieval death imagery
• juxtaposition “paused” = moment frozen in time
• macabre tone = eerie beauty in horror
Mid dance - so abrupt and sudden they didn’t even have time to complete the dance of death
Sheers gives dignity to the dead by capturing their last moment as a haunting ballet of frozen sacrifice.
“Their socketed heads tilted back at an angle”
visual image = chilling, anatomical exposure
• dehumanised detail “socketed” = skeletal, scientific
• frozen posture = finality of war’s violence
Sheers reduces the body to its bare form—emphasising the brutal honesty of death without glorification.
“Their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.”
• grim parenthesis = physical loss, some too broken to speak
• personification “dropped” = helpless surrender - died in agony - screaming out in pain - perhaps caught out mid scream
• silence = voice lost to time
Sheers reminds us that many cannot speak for themselves—their stories were interrupted by war.
“As if the notes they had sung / have only now, with this unearthing, / slipped from their absent tongues.”
metaphor “notes” = voices, lives, individuality - could be their screams
• “slipped” = gentle, tragic release of suppressed story
• extended metaphor = music as remembrance
Sheers ends with poetic resurrection—the voices of the dead are finally being heard after long silence.
Cannot even tell their own story - can’t speak for themselves (absent tongues)
Title: Mametz Wood
real WWI battle (Battle of the Somme) → historical grounding
• “Wood” = natural image contrasts unnatural death
• understated tone = contrasts horror of poem
• plain title = memorial-like simplicity
Structure & Form
• free verse = natural flow of memory + unearthed truth
• irregular stanza lengths = disrupted time, fragmented legacy
• frequent enjambment = movement between past + present
• tone = reflective, mournful, reverent
Context
written by modern Welsh poet Owen Sheers
• poem reflects on Welsh soldiers killed at Mametz Wood (1916)
• many were young, inexperienced, and poorly led
• Sheers wrote it as a response to their forgotten sacrifice
Themes
• Memory and forgotten sacrifice
• Nature and violence
• The legacy of war
• Youth and death
• History resurfacing
