Mametz Wood Essay Questions

How does the poem make connections across the distance of time?

The past makes itself apparent and relevant in the present-day Mametz Wood, site of a WWI battle. Over a century later, bones are still recovered in this place, reflecting the magnitude of deaths that occurred.

Think about the tenses employed by the poet. In multiple instances, the poet moves from the present to the past and vice versa. Beginning with the farmers coming across bones as they plow the land in the modern day, the poet proceeds to evoke the soldiers moving across the field "where they were told to walk, not run" (Line 8). Returning to the present day, the earth is personified as a guard reaching into itself to remember what happened.

The earth itself is a bridge between past and present. What in the present day is a peaceful woodland and field was once ravaged by the destruction of the battle. Less of a scar than a wound with the potential to fester, the earth continuously reveals relics from the past in the form of graves.

At the end of the poem, the notes that the soldiers had sung slip into the soundscape of the present day (Lines 19-21).

What is implicated by the poet describing the skeletons in terms of song and dance?

When the grave of the twenty soldiers with linked arms is discovered, the poet describes their skeletons as "paused mid dance-macabre" (Line 15). The Danse Macabre, or the Dance of Death, is an allegorical genre from the Middle Ages depicting a personified Death summoning people from all walks of life to dance toward death. It represented a new fascination with and attempt to deal with death, and was influenced by the high mortality rates of the Plague.

This description is the climax of the poem, but the poet chooses to pause them mid-movement. The violent and premature way they were killed keeps them from completing the Dance of Death.

At the end of the poem, the notes that the soldiers had sung slip into the soundscape of the present day (Lines 19-21). These notes are described in the past tense, but it is "only now, with this unearthing," that they can be heard (Line 20). Like the paused dance, these notes have been buried beneath the ground and the weight of obscurity. It is important to note that they do not sing words, perhaps suggesting an agonized song of war.

Song and dance are ancient and integral forms of human expression. However, the poet does not specify whether the skeletons will be able to complete the Dance of Death, nor explicitly state the tone of the songs they sang. The ambiguity of this ending implies that there is no way to completely sum up and move on from the implications of war.

Consider the ways that art forms are used to portray scenes of war. What are the poem's limits? In what ways (if at all) does it transcend the reality of war?

Sheers writes about the Battle of Mametz Wood from a contemporary perspective, reflecting on the ways that the past continuously surfaces into the present. In the first instance of directly evoking the scene of the battle, Sheers applies a sense of restraint: the soldiers are instructed "to walk, not run, / toward the wood and its nesting machine guns" (Lines 8-9). The next line situates the poem again in the present, thus leaving the scene right before the battle began. This demonstrates that the poem is more concerned with the implications of the past battle on the present than with diving into the immediacy of the battle scene.

It is possible to assert that art cannot completely convey the chaos, violence, fear, focus, and/or terror that accompanies the experience of battle. But art may still be one of the most powerful ways to evoke this complex experience. One thing that art in general and this poem in particular is capable of doing is transcending the immediate time and place to make sense of a difficult subject. When one is directly experiencing battle, all of one's focus must be on immediate survival. It is very difficult to consider larger connotations such as environmental damage, destruction or loss of culture, and generational trauma. Art may not be able to convey the immediate sense of violence, but it can get as close as possible while also dealing with larger connotations.

Perhaps the reason this poem is successful is because it does not attempt to completely resolve the implications of war. The poet only argues the necessity of reflecting upon the past as modeled by the personified earth.