1. Explore what these images could represent:
Bird’s egg shell
Plough blades
Old boots
Dancing skeleton
Mosaic

2. What are the five main things we must consider to understand a poem?L
eaning/ message
magery
one of voice
tructure
anguage

3. Read ‘Mametz Wood’ by Owen Sheers
Read ‘Mametz Wood’ by Owen Sheers. What are your First Impressions of the following?
Meaning: What is the poem’s message about war? Imagery: What are we made to picture? Tone: What is the speaker’s attitude based on how they would speak these words? Structure: How have the form, rhythm, rhyme, enjambment, sequence (and other devices) been used to emphasise meanings and feelings? Language: What kinds of language devices (verb patterns, similes, alliteration and others) are used and why?
MITSL

4. Circle these objects in the poem and make some notes about their connotations:
Bird’s egg
Plough blades
Mosaic
Old boots
Skeletons
CHALLENGE: Circle some more examples of imagery in the poem.

5. What are you looking for when discussing imagery?

6. DISCUSS: Taking into account the whole poem, what’s the poet’s view on war? What does it make us picture about war?

7. TASK: Explain how Owen Sheers uses imagery to present war.
Include quotations.
Explore more than one picture or link to war in each object.
How do these images make us react/feel?
Is there a pattern between these images? What? Why?

8. Read the example answer and compare it to your own.
In what ways would you improve your answer?
Include quotations.
Explore more than one picture or link to war in each object.
Use a range of my own words to explain the language.
Explain how these images make us react/feel.
Identify patterns between these images.

9. Imagery Example 1:
Owen Sheers makes us picture war as destructive through images such as a “broken bird’s egg of a skull”. The alliteration draws our attention to “broken” because the soldiers are broken mentally and physically. We are then made to picture their skull as a “bird’s egg” which suggests they are delicate, fragile and also links to new life as if their sacrifice means others can live on. Despite how fragile their skulls were though, their skeletons have lasted in the “one long grave” which suggests their legacy lives on. It is an unpleasant image though and makes us pity the soldiers and the destruction they had to endure and suffer through for their country.

10. Imagery Example 2:
Sheers presents war in a tragic way by describing the remnants of bodies as a “broken mosaic”. This makes us picture the bodies in fragmented pieces having suffered so much they have been completely shattered. However, these pieces have become united to create a mosaic because the damage they suffered meant they depended on one another. Therefore this montage of bone represents what they each sacrificed: broken bones as a replica of their broken souls, yet how these struggles brought them together, “arm in arm”. So individually they are weak but when they are together they become a strong force or recognisable image of brotherhood. This mosaic could be celebrating them as a lasting work of art for citizens to appreciate how all these individual lives were sacrificed to unite their country, establishing a sense of pride and gratification in the reader. Alternatively, if the mosaic itself is “broken” then it instils an image of this fight being worthless; a sacrifice that leaves behind irreparable broken remnants of life discarded down into their “one long grave” perhaps not to unite them but instead to conceal the brotherhood lost and unappreciated. Therefore, Sheers feels thankful for their sacrifice by comparing it to art therefore presenting war as a beautiful sacrifice.

11. As a consequence of images like these, how do you think Owen Sheers feels about war?
Language

12. Search
Discover
What are we aiming to do?
Explore the layers of meaning in the writer’s language choices in poetry.
Challenge: consider the writer’s attitude.

13. What’s happened in this picture? How do you know?
Key Words: Assume Suggested

14. Language
You will need to interpret what certain words suggest about war. Make some assumptions about the writer’s attitude towards war based on how he has chosen to present it to us.

15. What should you be aiming to identify when exploring language?
Mainly positive/ negative
Verbs
Similar words to create themes
Repetition
Alliteration

16. You will each be given one line from the poem
You will each be given one line from the poem. Annotate how the language in your line presents war in relation to some of these themes:
Conflict
Destruction
Resolution
Nature vs Man
CHALLENGE: Think of a couple more themes to develop your annotations.

17. Circle the room and see what you can add to other lines that people may have missed.
“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 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,”
“the wood and its nesting machine guns.”
“And even now, the earth stands sentinel,”
(the earth)“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.”

18. Evaluate your ideas about this line:
Why is this clause included?
“and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.”

19. Evaluate your ideas about this line:
What is the effect of this simile?
How does this personification of the earth link to war?
“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”
What does this motion suggest about war? What is uncomfortable about it?

20. Choose another line from the poem that we haven’t looked at together.
Make some annotations around it of the ways in which the words have been chosen to create certain effects.
Use a thesaurus to help you explore and explain some words if you want to.

21. Make a judgement and decide what the poem is about.
Circle any words that support your view of the meaning of this poem.

22. Make some annotations around your choices to explore the different meanings represented by or associated with your object.
You will now have the opportunity to see what everyone else came up with! Use this as inspiration to develop your own ideas.

23. Highlight the key words in your targeted level.
Explore the layers of meaning in the writer’s language choices in poetry.
Grade:
Highlight the key words in your targeted level.
Grade:
Grade:

24. Explore how Sheers uses language to present war in poetry.
Have you explored the layers of meaning in the writer’s language choices?
Explore how Sheers uses language to present war in poetry.

25. Key phrases to try and include:
Sheers presents war in a negative way by describing…
This is shown when he describes “ ”.
This suggests…
Sheers uses a (language feature) to suggest…
Alternatively, it could represent…
Therefore, war is presented as…
Challenge: Therefore, Sheers feels… about
war.

26. Example Language:
Sheers presents war as being an ongoing regime where war is acceptable; a concept he rejects, “they were told to walk, not run, towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.” This 3rd person narrative offers a removed perspective to emphasise how the soldiers were given commands and just followed orders, no questions asked. They lost individuality and became a collective faceless identity. Yet this is something Sheers pities in them as he makes them sound so vulnerable, needing instructions that are so childish, “they were told to walk” by adding the contrast “not run” to clarify as if they might not understand. It further suggests their panic as they were rushing and being advised to move slower and with more care; another example of their naivety to rush into a situation unprepared. This idea of youth evokes more sympathy in the reader when we are made to picture “nesting machine guns”, this implying that the weapons were comfortable and had been there a while. The violence was at home and ready for them. So they were facing their imminent death and still rushed to it in a blind panic. This idea of youth being directed to their deaths and their lack of understanding of what war really entailed is something Sheers feels angry about as he presents this idea of the fight as unfair through their youth and the security of the opposition.

27. Using the criteria, tick the level that you think yours meets.
Targets for improvement:

28. As a farmer, why might Sheers have a negative attitude towards war so many years down the line?
Walking over that same ground, now a ploughed field, 85 years later I was struck by how remnants of the battle – strips of barbed wire, shells, fragments of bone, were still rising to the surface. It was as if the earth under my feet that was now being peacefully tilled for food could not help but remember its violent past and the lives that had sunk away into it. Entering the wood, a ‘memory’ of the battle was still evident there too. Although there was a thick undergrowth of trailing ivy and brambles, it undulated through deep shell holes. My knowledge of what had caused those holes in the ground and of what had happened among those trees stood in strange juxtaposition to the Summer calmness of the wood itself; the dappled sunlight, the scent of wild garlic, the birdsong filtering down from the higher branches.
Owen Sheers wrote this poem after visiting the site of a WWI battlefield on the Somme in Northern France. He describes it as the following…

29. The Battle of the Somme
1916  The Battle of the Somme (French: Bataille de la Somme, German: Schlacht an der Somme), also known as the Somme Offensive, was a battle of the First World War fought by the armies of the British and French empires against the German Empire.  One of the largest of World War I, in which more than 1,000,000 men were wounded or killed, making it one of humanity's bloodiest battles.

30. Historical Context
It was at Mametz that the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, made a single handed attack on the enemy trenches on 4 July 1916, as recorded in his memoirs.
The Welsh poet Owen Sheers wrote a poem after the event in his Skirrid Hill collection:
"This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave, broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm, their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre”
A vivid description of the fighting in Mametz Wood

31. You need to make links between:
The writer’s purpose and structure
The language and suffering
WW1 in 1914 and The Battle of the Somme in is the suffering the same?
Tone and perspective between the poems

32. In what ways is suffering shown in Mametz Wood?
Why did the writer create this poem?
What is the relevance of when it was written?
What perspective has it been written from?
What tone does the narrator portray?

33. Can you find any examples of the following?
Tone
Think about which lines of the poem give us a sense of Sheers’ attitude towards war because of the way we imagine them being spoken.
Can you find any examples of the following?
Bitter tone (spitting his words out)
Angry tone (short and sharp)
Reflective tone (calm, longer sentences)
Appreciative tone (positive words)

34. Owen Sheers’ attitude towards war was…
 How did he feel?
 How does his tone reflect this?
Sheers had the attitude that war was pointless…
Sheers felt that war was unnecessarily sufferable when he describes…
Sheers’ attitude towards war was that it was destructive in many ways…

35. What examples of conflict can you find in the poem?
Life and death
Nature and mankind
Love and hate
War and peace
Right and wrong
Power

36. Quick Review

37. Structure
“For years afterwards the farmers found them – the wasted young” “the blown and broken bird’s egg”
What does the dash do?
Emphasises last part “wasted”. Anger – conflict between life and death.
What does the enjambment highlight?
Separates “blown” from “broken” – makes suffering last. (Alliteration)
Find another example of where enjambment has been used and explain its effect.
CHALLENGE: Explore the overall impact of its use throughout the poem between lines and stanzas.

38. Explain how Sheers uses one or two of the following to create an impression of war in his poem.

39. Example Answer:
Sheers uses stanzas of equal length because it gives the reader a sense of security. This could show how he, as a farmer in 2005, feels about experiencing the war second hand. He knows it has passed so he isn’t frightened of it. However he does have to see what the poor soldiers went through on a regular basis when he works. The reader can understand his constant conflict with wanting to nurture a land that has dealt with so much pain and destruction. It could therefore also suggest a conflict between the innocence of nature and the destructiveness of mankind.

40. Swap answers. Give your peer a WWW and an EBI.
Use of more than on quotation
Identifying a structural device
Linking the use of the device to a meaning in the poem
Explaining how this structural device affects the reader
Linking the use of this device to the writer’s attitude
Interpreting what this device suggests about war
Offering alternative insights into the use of each structural device
Identifying and explaining patterns in structure

41. Overview: Highlight any aspects of the following that need to be a target for you to work on when exploring this poem. Tick any which you feel more confident in exploring.