Poetry: Mametz Wood Flashcards
(18 cards)
Whys: 1
Sheers depicts the true horrors of warfare and condemns the futile squandering of young lives as
a result of conflict.
Whys: 2
The poem is elegiac in nature, serving to pay homage to the immense courage and sacrifice of
the 38th Welsh Division of the British army.
What themes are present in this poem?
Passage of time
Pain and suffering
Death and loss
Effects of war
Nature
Which poems can be linked with this poem?
Dulce et decorum est
A wife in London
The soldier
The manhunt
Summary
Mametz Wood reflects on a World War I battle where many Welsh soldiers died fighting for Mametz Wood during the Battle of the Somme. Years later, farmers are still finding bones and relics in the fields. The poem honours the soldiers’ bravery while criticising how needlessly and brutally they died, and how history tried to forget them
Context 1
The poem is about the 38th Welsh Division, who fought at Mametz Wood in 1916 and suffered massive losses due to poor leadership.
Context 2
Owen Sheers is a modern Welsh poet, and he wrote this to remember the sacrifice of Welsh soldiers and to show how war wounds the land and memory.
Form
A free verse narrative poem with some long and short lines.
Form and content
The free verse mirrors the uneven, disrupted land and the broken bodies buried beneath it. It’s natural and reflective, like memory surfacing.
Structure
The poem has 7 stanzas, mostly 3 lines each (tercets), giving it a neat appearance, like a graveyard row.
But within those neat stanzas, there’s violence and horror—mirroring how the land looks peaceful, but hides death.
The structure gradually builds up to the final haunting image of the soldiers singing, bringing emotional weight
Rhyming
No consistent rhyme scheme, but occasional half-rhymes (e.g. “blade” / “blades”).
This gives a disjointed, unsettled feel—appropriate for the theme of disturbed earth and broken lives.
For years afterwards the farmers found them
Memory, Legacy
Temporal shift
Suggests the long-lasting impact of war—soldiers’ presence is still in the land.
A chit of bone, the relic of a finger
Death, Fragility
Diminutive language, imagery
Dehumanises the body—only tiny parts are left, showing how violently they died.
Broken bird’s egg of a skull
Innocence, Loss
Metaphor, alliteration
Compares a skull to an egg—shows fragility of life and evokes a sense of wasted youth
This earth has never been silent
Nature, Memory
Personification
The ground itself remembers the trauma—the war still speaks through it.
The dance-macabre
Death, Horror
Allusion (French: ‘dance of death’)
Evokes a gruesome, historical image—the war was a grotesque spectacle of death.
Slipped from their absent tongues
Silence, Legacy
Metaphor
The soldiers can’t speak, but the poem gives them a voice—honours their memory.
A broken mosaic of bone
Destruction, Legacy
Juxtaposition, metaphor
Mosaic suggests beauty, but it’s made of bones—tragic image of what’s left of the men.
