Owen Sheers: Mametz Wood: A Short Analysis

This is an analysis of Mametz Wood, stanza by stanza:

For years afterwards the farmers found them –
the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades
as they tended the land back into itself.

The natural world reveals the hastily buried young soldiers years after they died violent and unnatural deaths during the battle of the Somme; one of the most terrible, futile battles ever fought. The fact that the soldiers are ‘found’ by ‘farmers’ gives a sense of care and tenderness to what was originally gratuitous slaughter and senseless sacrifice. Time has combined the bones of the dead with the earth, a combination suggestive of reconciliation and even of healing. If the land has not been ‘itself’ then this is because war is licensed murder and the land as well as the soldiers was brutalised and violated to serve some  ideology or greed. The conflict is between the past and the present, between the degraded earth as the hasty dumping ground  for violent death and now as the  pastoral setting for healing through the natural processes of degeneration.

A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,
the relic of a finger, the blown
and broken bird’s egg of a skull,

The delicacy of the soldiers’ remains is highlighted through the poet’s choice of metaphor. The human remains are undifferentiated from one body to another, for the soldiers died together and it is as if there can be no individuation even in death; this is both grotesque and  poignant. Even the term ‘relic’ suggests a religious, spiritual connotation.Symbolism is not static and the meaning and interpretation of any event may alter with the passage of time.  The sacrifice of the dead has attained mythical, transcendent status in the eyes of those who discover them again, so many years after their obliteration in this inhumane slaughter of a battle. The ‘birds egg of a  skull’ reminds me of the end to one of Philip Larkin’s most brilliant and affecting poems, The Explosion where the after a catastrophic explosion in a mine, one of the dead miners is recalled tenderly holding an egg. The fragility of life and its transience captured perfectly and most naturally through this re imagined gesture.

all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white
across this field where they were told to walk, not run,
towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.

Colours and textures of different bodies and the texture of the earth itself where their bodies are like old bits of china, playing at being different materials with different identities. Even our identity as human beings becomes transformed by death and the inevitable passage of time. The criminal stupidity of the order to ‘walk, not run’ made the Welsh soldiers sitting targets for the German gunmen hidden in the wood. The loyalty and disciplined obedience of the Welsh Battalion rendered them victims of both their own leaders and the ‘nesting machine guns.’ Look at the disturbing juxtaposition between ‘nesting’ and ‘machine guns.’ This seems an oxymoron, but then war contaminates all relationships and states. Here the word ‘nesting’ gives the ‘machine guns’ a naturalness that they do not deserve. They appear to be at ‘home’ in the woods, but in fact they are purposeful interlopers waiting to mow down the poor soldiers adhering to their fatuous  order to ‘walk’ rather than run.’  Who were the Generals  in charge of directing military operations at this time and what care did they have for their men? Class divisions were so wide and entrenched that the soldiers were regarded as disposable and to use Wilfred Owen’s famous words, ‘like cattle’ .

And 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.

The natural world, the ‘earth’ now watches guard over the lost dead soldiers, yielding the bones of these forgotten men up for the scrutiny and acknowledgement of the living. This is like a from of excavation, where the past returns to the world of the living through the careful disturbance of the earth’s soil. The simile is especially affecting ‘like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.’ Whatever has been buried beneath the surface of things, whether skin or soil will eventually reappear. That which is repressed will return. Memory itself may involve repression too, as Toni Morrrison brilliantly suggests in Beloved when she talks of ‘dis-remembering.’

This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,
a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,
their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre

The discovery ‘this morning’ is made immediate through the use of the present tense. The actual number of the dead gives dramatic reality and intensity to the discovery. The men were not allowed the luxury of individual graves. they are buried, as they died, together, undifferentiated yet poignantly connected too. They appear almost ‘antic’ as they are described as a ‘broken mosaic’ and we may feel the poet is reminding us of the ironic repetitions of history. One place a substitute for another. Pompeii for Mametz wood perhaps?

in boots that outlasted them,
their socketed heads tilted back at an angle
and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.

The pathos of the ‘boots’ outlasting the men. Boots were notoriously short-lived in the trenches as they tended to rot with the sodden conditions. Yet the boots have remained recognisably ‘boots’ whilst the men have become ‘socketed heads’ deprived of flesh and eyeballs, they look as if they are trying to yell something out, dying perhaps crying for something or someone beyond the savagery of Mametz Wood. They seem on the verge of speech, of a message communicated to this living world, after all the buried time…

As if the notes they had sung
have only now, with this unearthing,
slipped from their absent tongues.

Another powerful simile ends the poem. The dead are trying to communictae with the living. Their notes’ have only just manged to escape their buried, silent state with the farmer’s discovery today. Thier tongues have been lost and they were ignored anyway, which is why they died so pointlessly. Now we hear them, we acknowledge their messages and their tragedy. The excavation of the bodies, reanimates the dead, the past in the way that the poem itself is a form of excavation as it brings back, through words, expereinces that have been lost or forgotten, or rendered silent.

A superb poem. One of the best in the AQA Anthology for power and pathos.