‘Mametz Wood’ by Owen Sheers (Poetry Analysis, GCSE)

A WW1 battleground is both a site of trauma and memory when buried soldiers are rediscovered.

‘Mametz Wood’ by Owen Sheers

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

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,

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.

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.

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Mametz Wood’

Mametz Wood, in northern France, was the site of a battle during the First World War, in July 1916. Sheers portrays a strong connection between the environment and the battle throughout the poem.

The bones of the ‘wasted youth’ who died on the battle site keep ‘turning up under [the farmers’] plough blades’. Like ‘a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin’, the earth is now surfacing bits of the buried soldiers’ bones. Neither the bones nor the memories can be safely buried and permanently forgotten. Both are surfacing again, as if the land is haunted by the trauma of the battle.

The idea of a wound also suggests that the land itself injured. Indeed, the farmers continue to care for the land ‘for years afterwards’ to turn ‘the land back into itself’, suggesting the battle altered it beyond recognition.

In the face of this kind of lasting damage, our impulse may be to block out memories of war – but our remembrance is vital. This is why the ‘earth stands sentinel’, guarding protectively over the men buried within it. The land itself has become a site of remembrance, ‘reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened’.

The memorial statue at Mametz Wood. Photo Credit: Nell Stokes via Flickr cc

The rediscovered presence of the soldiers’ bodies forces us to confront and commemorate their deaths, and to reflect on the impact of war. Death has prematurely silenced these young men. However, the skeletons are found with their jaws ‘dropped open’, prompting the speaker to reflect that it is ‘only now, with this unearthing’, that we may hear ‘the notes they had sung’. In other words, unearthing the bodies has finally given the dead soldiers a voice.

The wound image, then, also has a positive side. If the foreign body can surface, the wound can finally begin to heal. By remembering, rather than avoiding, war, we can begin to overcome the trauma it causes. Place is intimately connected with memory: the site of Mametz Wood becomes commemorative and so, by allowing us to access the past, helps us to move towards the future.

 

‘Case History: Alison (Head Injury)’ by UA Fanthorpe (Poetry Analysis, GCSE)

Fanthorpe shows how integral memory is to our sense of self through a patient suffering a serious head injury.

‘Case History: Alison (Head Injury)’ by UA Fanthorpe

(She looks at her photograph)

I would like to have known
My husband’s wife, my mother’s only daughter.
A bright girl she was.

Enmeshed in comforting
Fat, I wonder at her delicate angles.
Her autocratic knee

Like a Degas dancer’s
Adjusts to the observer with an airy poise
That now lugs me upstairs

Hardly. Her face, broken
By nothing sharper than smiles, holds in its smiles
What I have forgotten.

She knows my father’s dead
And grieves for it, and smiles. She has digested
Mourning. Her smile shows it.

I, who need reminding
Every morning, shall never get over what
I do not remember.

Consistency matters.
I should like to keep faith with her lack of faith,
But forget her reasons.

Proud of this younger self,
I assert her achievements, her A levels,
Her job with a future.

Poor clever girl! I know,
For all my damaged brain , something she doesn’t:
I am her future.

A bright girl she was.

After a head injury affects her memory, Alison, the poem’s speaker, looks at an old photograph of herself.

Throughout the poem, Alison makes an important distinction between her present and past selves. She identifies the woman in the old photograph as ‘my husband’s wife, my mother’s only daughter’ – rather than as herself. She uses the third person ‘her’ and ‘she’ throughout, as if the Alison before the accident is literally another person.

Alison wants to ‘keep faith’ with her past self’s ‘lack of faith’ but she ‘forget[s] her reasons’. In other words, Alison struggles to maintain the values and beliefs she had before her accident. Our beliefs are key to defining who we are, yet we are not born with them: they are built up over a lifetime of learning and experience. Without memory, Alison can’t remember why she believed in her particular value system. And without this value system, she is another step further from being the person she once was.

The absence of memory also has a profound emotional effect. Although she was ‘griev[ing]’ for her father’s death, the past self was still able to ‘smile’ in the photograph. After the accident, however, Alison ‘need[s] reminding / Every morning’ that her father has died. Her fractured memory erodes continuity between one day and the next, as if she is repeating the same day forever. The loss of her father, then, is experienced anew daily, meaning that she ‘shall never get over what / [she does] not remember’.

Photo Credit: Eva Van Ostade via Flickr cc

The present self is stranded, unable to access the past. However, the past self is also frozen in time in the photograph, unaware of the future.

The past self may have achievements, relationships and a stable identity but the present Alison has one striking advantage. ‘For all [her] damaged brain’, she knows something her past self doesn’t: ‘I am her future’. This is both poignant and unsettling, highlighting the fragility of our own identities which seem so stable and innate but in fact could disappear any time.

‘Consistency matters’, Alison recognises. But without memory, consistency is lost; Alison becomes disassociated from her past as the world is repeatedly experienced anew. Fanthorpe suggests that it’s the memories of how we were in the past – what we achieved, what we have felt or believed, the relationships we have made – that makes us who we are in the present.

Strong Language: The Power of Words in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy

A comparison of ‘Brothers’, ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘Litany’ from Mean Time (1993)

Brothers’: What’s in a Name?

In her poem ‘Brothers’, Duffy suggests that language is stable and reliable in the face of change. Words are therefore closely connected to memory.

The poem’s speaker now has an estranged relationship with her adult brothers. Yet they can still ‘be made to laugh’ at ‘random quotes from the play we were in’. The individuals change – but the quotes do not. The brothers ‘grin and nod’, recognising, remembering, reliving their childhood relationship. Language functions as a direct link to their shared past.

The speaker ‘[doesn’t] have photographs’, so when asked about her siblings, she ‘[recites] their names’. These words embody their identities. How they look is irrelevant. Words, Duffy suggests, tell us more than appearances. Or, at least, words are more meaningful to our memory. Maybe this is because appearances change – her brothers look like strangers as adults. In her memory, they ‘shrink’ to the children she knew. Since names don’t change they are more stable and therefore more useful for remembering.

Never Forget.
Photo Credit: Matthieu Luna via Compfight cc

Similarly, since her mother named the children, the speaker ‘hear[s] [her mother’s] life in the words’. There is something alive in language here: a part of her mother lives on within words. The speaker feels connected to both her mother and brothers, just through language. A word, Duffy demonstrates, has multiple emotional associations and so works powerfully within our memory.

‘Nostalgia’: Actions Speak Louder Than Words?

In her poem ‘Nostalgia’, Duffy suggests that language is powerful as it spreads ideas. Words can therefore influence the way we experience the world.

‘Some would never / fall in love had they not heard of love’. We often think of love as natural, instinctual, non-rational and fundamentally human. Yet, in ‘Nostalgia’, Duffy implies that falling in love is not a naturally occurring experience. Instead, it happens only as a consequence of learning about love first – through language.

Language shapes our expectations and understanding of the world and so shapes the way we actually experience things. Duffy here suggests that language, as Jacques Derrida claims, ‘programs us and precedes us’. Without the word ‘love’, we may not recognise or desire the experience of love, at least to the same extent. Perhaps love is an extreme example, but Duffy uses it to make a bold claim about the fundamental influence of language on our perceptions and expectations.

 

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‘Litany’: Anything You Say May Be Held Against You

In her poem ‘Litany’, Duffy suggests that language is a powerful social tool with great emotional impact. Words can therefore be dangerous.

The speaker remembers that ‘[l]anguage embarrassed’ her mother’s friends. ‘An embarrassing word’ was ‘broken // to bits’. Taken whole, the words is too shocking to use; it must be censored, broken up and spelled out, to diminish its impact. Duffy emphasises this by visually separating ‘broken’ and ‘to bits’ with both a line break and a stanza break.

This is a world, then, ‘where no one had cancer, or sex, or debts, / and certainly not leukaemia, which no one could spell’. The words themselves are too dangerous or unpleasant to say, so no one discusses these experiences, essentially denying their existence altogether. No one has cancer, these women pretend, because none of them can bare to say the word ‘cancer’. Words come with a lot of emotional baggage.

Language is a social tool. As such, there are many rules about the correct use of language in certain situations. This is ‘the code’ the speaker learns at her ‘mother’s knee’. The group understands not to use words like cancer. But the speaker, a child, and not fully initiated into this adult world, subverts this careful code: ‘A boy in the playground, I said, told me / to fuck off‘. The phrase ‘fuck off’ causes ‘uproar’. The speaker has broken the rules about language. The social group is angry, her mother is humiliated and the speaker – punished.

The boy in the playground.
Photo Credit: Lawrence Whittemore via Compfight cc

Do you agree or disagree with these poems? Is language our most powerful tool for expression? Or is a picture worth a thousand words? Do you struggle to say what you mean and mean what you say?