War
The poem reflects upon the ways that war leaves its mark on future generations and the earth. This is first made clear in the second line by the phrase "the wasted young," which defines the poet's argument about war. That they are "wasted" means they were expended carelessly for a meaningless cause.
The fourth stanza makes clear that the presence of war is a "wound" on the earth (Line 12). The earth must work to "bring a foreign body to the surface" (Line 12). This signifies that war is something that must be expelled or it will cause disease.
Uncovering Meaning
The poem, like an archaeological dig, seeks to uncover past relics buried in the earth and create meaning based on those findings. Digging physically occurs throughout the poem as the farmers plow the land, the earth reaches back into itself for reminders of what happened, and an unearthing reveals twenty men buried together in a long grave. The physical relics are eloquently described. The "china plate of a shoulder blade" implies something delicate and beautiful, but also something that others will use to eat from (Line 4). The "broken bird's egg of a skull" directly represents the skull as something from nature, fragile and broken (Line 6). The poet uses the uncovering of relics in the poem to say something about what happened at Mametz Wood through the lens of the horrors of war.
This theme of uncovering what was buried reflects both the content and form of the poem. Both poems and burials are capable of condensing the world and communicating something bleak, and they require time to be worked through.
Nature and Technology
Nature and technology (the various devices and systems created by people to fulfill some function) are contrasted at various points in the poem. The most pertinent example occurs in the third stanza with the "nesting machine guns" in the woods (Lines 8-9). The word "nesting" evokes an animal building a shelter for itself and its young, which is something that machine guns are obviously unable to do. This description of the guns also links vividly, and somewhat horrifically, to the description of the soldiers' skulls as "broken [bird's eggs]" in an earlier line.
Even though it is technology, in the form of modern warfare, that the poem identifies as the force that alienates humans from nature, it is the farmers' plows (themselves a form of technology) that help uncover what happened. This shows that the poet is not arguing that technology is inherently evil, but that humans must learn to use it responsibly.
Sheers often casts nature as a force that humans must learn from in his poetry. The earth is the guard that "stands sentinel" over the bones, and yet the soldiers are described as "foreign bodies" within a wound (Line 12). Because their premature deaths were brought about as a result of war technologies, the personified earth must reckon with this terrible fact. This stanza suggests that it is the responsibility of today's humans to understand the horrors of war, just as the earth "[reaches] back into itself for reminders of what happened" (Line 11).
