MAMETZ WOOD

Question 1

Poet / date

Answer 1

Owen Sheers / 2005

Question 2

Historical context

Answer 2

• Welsh poet
• Wrote after visiting battlefield
• Welsh never recognised for sacrifice leaving 600 dead and 4000 injured

Question 3

Literary context

Answer 3

• Gives voice to ‘silent unknown skeletons’
• Deliberately prosaic language gives voice
• Easy lyricism(guardian) and aural appeal deliberately reminiscent of a Welsh male choir and so POIGNANTLY PATRIOTIC

Question 4

Form and strucutre

Answer 4

• Regular stanzas = soldiers control
• Free verse = immensity of battle
• Elagaic lament to the dead
• First stanza rooted in the past, last stanza pays tribute to fallen

Question 5

Link to?

Answer 5

London
- Forgotton corruption and struggleof people, voice to voiceless

Ozymandias
- History written by the winners
- Ease of forgotton and obliteration of such an impoacrtful event
- Shelley -> history written by poetsd
Sheers -> writing welsh into histopry through poetry

Question 6

‘Wasted young’

Answer 6

• adjective

lives lost // discarded highlights poets thoughts that the lives have been disregarded for no purpose

Question 7

‘Farmers found them’

Answer 7

• Fricative alliteration
  Shows plentiful / abundance of bodies, sheer volume
  wowzers!

Question 8

‘broken bird’s eggs of skulls’

Answer 8

alliteration
Anthropomorphic, highlight fragility and damage time has done to these once living things
Birds egg -> Youth of soliders, their skulls with so much life yet to live???//

Question 9

‘Nesting machine guns’

Answer 9

• Naturistic metaphor linking guns to nesting birds

As if soldiers were walking to their certain deaths

Question 10

‘Earth stands sentinal’

Answer 10

• Earth standing guard
  Caring for / protecting these lsot bodies?
  Truest honour to be honoured by the world/ nature

Question 11

‘Reaching back into itself’

‘like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin’

Answer 11

• Simile evocative of healing
  Earth is healing itself // wants people to knwo what happened
  Nature / passage of time as ultimate power and dictatpr of world, poets = legislator

Question 12

‘Boots that outlasted them’

Answer 12

Irony
emphasizes how short their lives were
the bodies / stories gone but that that is manmade is surviving -> arrogant? out of place

Question 13

‘sung’ ‘only now’ absent tongues’

Answer 13

Sung and Tongue is only clear rhyme
This gives a sense of resolution / completion as if Sheers has done what he needs to do
The songs of the men have finally been heard
Cathartic

‘Only now’ How long they have had to wait

Question 14

‘Mid - dance’

Answer 14

Frozen in time, united front of men in face of death

BRAVERRY