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“Mametz Wood” Introduction
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"Mametz Wood" was written in 2005 by British poet Owen Sheers. Mametz is a village in Northern France; the woodland nearby was the site of an especially bloody battle during World War I, in which around 4,000 men from the British Army's Welsh Regiment were killed. Sheers's poem is set many years later, and considers the way that, even a century after the conflict, the land around Mametz Wood is still filled with fragments of the dead soldiers' bodies. The poem is thus a consideration of the horrors of war, and is particularly effective in the way it places natural imagery side-by-side with the frightening and deadly power of human technology.
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“Mametz Wood” Summary
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For years following the battle at Mametz Wood, farmers would find them—the remains of soldiers, killed far too young, churned up by the farmers' ploughs as they worked the soil.
They'd find a piece of bone sticking out of the ground like a note written on a small piece of paper; a shoulder blade that looked like a delicate porcelain plate; all that's left of a finger; a skull blown into pieces like a crushed bird's egg.
All these bits of bone blend in with the shards of bluish white stones strewn across the field, the same field where the soldiers had been ordered to walk—rather than to run—towards the woods where the Germans lay in wait with their machine guns, settled seamlessly into the surrounding forest like nesting birds.
To this day the earth guards the soldiers' remains, only letting some of their bones be churned up to the surface of the field as a way of reminding people what happened—as though the earth was a wounded human body trying rid itself of something that shouldn't be there.
Just this morning, twenty men were discovered buried in a single mass grave. The picture created by all the pieces of their broken bones made it look like they were arm in arm, as though they had been stopped in the middle of a grotesque dance of death,
still wearing combat boots that were in much better condition than the soldiers' themselves. Their skulls, with empty holes at the base for their spinal cords, were drawn back, and their jaws had fallen open (though some of them didn't have jaws anymore at all).
It seemed as though only now, with their long-silenced bodies having been discovered, could they finally communicate their message to the world.
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“Mametz Wood” Themes
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The Horror and Wastefulness of War
“Mametz Wood” is a poem based on a particular episode of World War I, in which around 4,000 Allied soldiers of Welsh nationality were killed. Essentially, the poem is a bleak and unflinching reflection on the horrors of war, focusing on the way that, almost a century on from the original conflict, farmers are still chancing upon body parts of the fallen soldiers.
The poem aims to unsettle readers with its gruesome imagery, which acts as a reminder of the immense suffering caused by WWI and, in the eyes of the speaker, is perhaps a more realistic memorial to those who died than the sculpture that stands in Mametz Wood now (which features a Welsh Red Dragon tearing up a barbed wire fence). To that end, the poem also rejects any sense of glory or heroism regarding warfare, instead arguing that war represents a tragic “waste” of young life.
In the poem, each soldier’s body represents a life that was in a way unfulfilled, or at least cut short. Accordingly, the fragmented form in which the soldiers’ bodies are found metaphorically represents the way that war destroyed these lives—and, indeed, how war fragmented society more broadly by claiming the lives of so many of its young men. That’s why the speaker describes the bones as parts of a “broken mosaic”—because they represent part of a whole that can never be completed. The comparison of a skull to a shattered bird's egg also evokes the fragility of life—and the inability to restore it once it's metaphorically broken.
This waste of life is further emphasized by the way that the soldiers are described as having been “paused” in a "dance-macabre" (a death dance). This is a long-running genre of art in which humans are depicted dancing with figures of death (usually skeletons). These works are intended to remind the living of their own mortality, a meaning that is definitely relevant here. But also it's worth noting that the soldiers don't even have time to finish their death dance—that's how abruptly and violently their lives are ended.
Indeed, the poem’s closing image is one of incompleteness. The freed skeletons—those with jaws—are now able to sing their song, no longer suffocated by the earth. But, of course, they have no tongues with which to do so. The mention of the tongue is a deliberately gruesome image that starkly reminds the reader of the way that the body deteriorates over time—and how these bodies haven’t had their proper burials.
But the poem doesn’t use these graphic moments just to shock or entertain. The poem suggests that it’s important to talk in these terms because doing so gives a truer depiction of what war is actually like. Grand memorials and services are important, but the poem argues that a reminder of the realities of conflict is important too. That’s why the personified earth—though only mentioned briefly—is a kind of key character in the poem. It is described as “reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened / like a wound working with a foreign body to the surface of the skin.” As if by instinct, the earth senses the importance of remembering these men not just in the abstract, but in their bodily reality too—however grim.
“Mametz Wood,” then, is not an easy read. But its discussion of the body parts of dead soldiers helps to make the soldiers seem real again—not just statistics or names inscribed on a stone memorial. Accordingly, a small part of the horror of war is played out on the page for the reader to experience—in order to emphasize the immense sacrifice that was made at the time, as well as the sheer waste of life.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-21
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Nature vs. Technology
In addition to broadly reflecting on the horrors of war, "Mametz Wood" also explores the relationship between nature and humankind's capacity for technological destruction. The First World War was an especially bloody conflict—and much of this was due to the new technology that both sides had at their fingertips. The damage done to humanity by these weapons (that is, injuries and casualties) was and remains obvious, but the poem is also keen to stress the way that the earth itself has been damaged by advances in warfare. Furthermore, by drawing similarities between the land and the human body, the poem implicitly argues that human technology has alienated humanity from its place in nature.
The setting of the poem—and of the conflict that inspired it—is important. Woods are supposed to be natural environments, full of life in all its variety. Indeed, they are meant to be places were people can take a walk and commune with nature (this idea is toyed with grotesquely in the "walk, not run" of line 8). But the natural landscape here is inhabited just as much by bits of fingers and skulls as it is by birds, flowers, and squirrels. Indeed, this is part of the poem's power: the way that the brutal realities of war are placed within a natural context. And at the time of the battle itself, the wood was full of more immediate death and suffering. For instance, instead of being nested by birds, "machine guns" lay in wait (line 9). Nature, then, was subverted by human technology—which, in turn, resulted in a terrible loss of human life.
Throughout the poem, technology is presented as a subtly malevolent force. The sheer power of war weaponry has made human beings themselves as fragile as "bird's egg[s]." The durable boots used in warfare have "outlasted" those who wore them—and even the more innocent tools used by farmers (such as the "plough blades" mentioned in line 2) bring body parts up to the surface. Those body parts, in turn, are distanced from the people they once belonged to—compared instead to china plates and useless relics. In a way, then, the weapons of war have erased the dead soldiers' humanity.
But the poem is also keen to draw similarities between human beings and nature, to remind the reader that human beings are, ultimately, part of nature. Indeed, the earth metaphorically guards the fallen soldiers, implying the deep connection between humanity and the natural world. Yet while burial might typically be considered something natural—the dead's return to the earth, dust to dust—the soldiers' bones are compared to a "foreign body" inside the ground in part because their deaths were decidedly unnatural; they died young, mowed down by machine gun fire. In other words, they don't belong in the dirt, and their presence is akin to a "wound." The poem subtly suggests how technology has disrupted the natural cycle of life and death, leading the earth to expel the soldiers' remains as "reminders of what happened."
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-3
- Lines 5-6
- Lines 7-9
- Lines 10-12
- Line 16
- Lines 19-21
- Line 20
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Mametz Wood”
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Lines 1-3
For years afterwards ...
... back into itself."Mametz Wood" is a poem with a specific historical context that is important to note before this discussion. Mametz is a village in Northern France, and the nearby wood was the scene of a brutal battle during the First World War. In this battle, a section of the British Army—known as the 38th (Welsh) Infantry Division—was tasked with attacking the German stronghold in the wood, or forest. Around 4,000 men on the British side were killed during the conflict.
As referred to in the poem's opening, farmers have been finding body parts of the fallen ever since. The alliterating and consonant /f/ sounds in the first line come across almost like discoveries themselves, as though they were poking out of the line above the other letters:
For years afterwards the farmers found them –
The speaker then emphasizes the youthfulness of those killed. Over half of all WWI soldiers were between 18 and 23 when they enlisted; an incredible amount of young life was "wasted." Additionally, the caesura just after "young" gives the line a short pause, allowing the reader to reflect on this fact.
There is something deeply unsettling about this stanza's mention of the bodies "turning up under [the farmers'] plough blades," but this is nothing compared to the graphic details that are to come. It's also worth noting that there is something vaguely threatening about the "plough blades"—even though they are an agricultural tool, they seem to hint at man's capacity for destructive technology, the kind that made WW1 so devastating.
In line 3, "tended" works as a kind of pun. It relates on a literal level to the farmers' actions of tending the land, but also sets up one of the poem's metaphors regarding the land as somehow injured—"tending" its wounds. This also gently develops the tension between nature (which humans are a part of) and the fearsome power of man-made technology, which ravaged the earth and has left scars on the Mametz landscape that can still be seen today.
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Lines 4-6
A chit of ...
... of a skull,
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Lines 7-12
all mimicked now ...
... of the skin. -
Lines 13-16
This morning, twenty ...
... that outlasted them, -
Lines 17-21
their socketed heads ...
... their absent tongues.
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“Mametz Wood” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
"Mametz Wood" uses alliteration to great effect throughout. The first example is in line 1:
For years afterwards the farmers found them —
These /f/ sounds ring together as if the reader is discovering them as the line progresses, each one an obvious and sudden presence. This mimics the way the farmers accidentally find body parts in the soil. Indeed, the visual height of the /f/ also makes them look as though they stick out of the line, poking above the average height of the other letters.
In the following stanza, alliteration is again obvious:
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 two /ch/ sounds have a sharp feel, conveying the sharp fragments of bone found in the earth. This sound also gently echoes the noise of machine gun fire. Indeed, the /b/ sounds that follow in the next two lines also feel somewhat violent and noisy, helping the stanza to subtly hint at the sensory terror that comes with warfare.
The next key examples of alliteration are in the fourth stanza, which describes the earth as:
reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened
like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.These sounds are part of a key metaphor in the poem, in which the earth is compared to a human body. And, like a human body, the earth is trying to get rid of its "foreign" objects. The progression from alliterative /r/ to /w/ to /s/ sounds, then, represents the movement of "a foreign body to the surface of the skin" (or the ground). The sounds themselves even move from the throat (the /r/ sound) to the tip of the tongue (the /s/ sound), as if the trying to work their way out of the mouth. Additionally, the shared sounds are suggestive of small and somewhat difficult movements. Throughout the poem, then, alliteration helps capture the powerful aftermath of war and its effects on the natural landscape.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 1: “F,” “f,” “f”
- Line 2: “u,” “u”
- Line 3: “i,” “i”
- Line 4: “ch,” “ch,” “l,” “b,” “l”
- Line 5: “b,” “l”
- Line 6: “b,” “b”
- Line 7: “b,” “b”
- Line 8: “w,” “w,” “w”
- Line 9: “w”
- Line 10: “s,” “s”
- Line 11: “r,” “r,” “w,” “h”
- Line 12: “w,” “w,” “s,” “s”
- Line 13: “m,” “m”
- Line 14: “b,” “b,” “a,” “a”
- Line 15: “m,” “m”
- Line 18: “th,” “th,” “th,” “th”
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Metaphor
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Personification
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Pun
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Simile
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“Mametz Wood” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Wasted Young
- Plough Blades
- Tended
- Chit
- Flint
- Sentinel
- Foreign Body
- Mosaic
- Dance-Macabre
- Socketed
Wasted Young-
(Location in poem: Line 2: “wasted young”)
This refers to those who died fighting in the First World War, specifically in the battle at Mametz Wood. These soldiers were for the most part young men.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Mametz Wood”
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Form
"Mametz Wood" is a twenty-one line poem consisting of seven tercets, used regularly from start to finish. That said, the poem doesn't feel formally strict because it is neither regularly rhymed nor written in regular meter.
In addition, the poem's line lengths fluctuate a lot. Long lines capture a sense of "reaching" and breathlessness, as in lines 11 to 12:
reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened
like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.Meanwhile, short lines capture a poignant, quiet feeling, as in line 16: "in boots that outlasted them." Here, the sadness of the fact that the soldiers' boots lasted longer than they did is packed into the simplicity of a short line.
Structurally, the first stanza is a kind of general introduction to the poem's main subject, while the second reads like an itemized list of gruesome Mametz Wood discoveries. Stanzas three and four deal more with nature's relationship to the conflict, likening nature to a wounded soldier.
The final three stanzas discuss yet another discovery, this time of twenty men buried in a mass grave. The poem ends by imagining that unearthing these skeletons has allowed "the notes they had sung" to finally be released, and perhaps some peace has returned to the land.
The poem is written in the past tense throughout, which gives it a sense of linking back across the years to the original conflict. As the same time, the poem still reads as if written from a contemporary vantage point (as indicated by the phrases like "now" and "This morning"). This also helps emphasize the sheer amount of body parts in the soil: they are still being discovered almost a century later.
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Meter
"Mametz Wood" is written in free verse, meaning it does not follow a regular meter. Instead, the lines are unpredictable in terms of meter—perhaps mimicking the unpredictable manner in which farmers stumble upon the remains of fallen soldiers.
There is one interesting moment of metrical regularity, though, which can be found in line 8:
across | this field | where they | were told | to walk, | not run,
This line is made up entirely of iambs—poetic feet that follow an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern. This sudden regularity notably occurs just as the poem is talking about how the soldiers were ordered to "walk, not run" into the woods—where many of them would meet their brutal deaths. The regularity of the iambs in this moment—da DUM, da DUM, da DUM—evokes the sensation of walking steadily, of one foot following the other as the soldiers move towards their inevitable doom.
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Rhyme Scheme
There is no rhyme scheme in "Mametz Wood," which is instead written in free verse. Perhaps this is because tidy, predictable rhymes would feel at odds with the poem's rather grim and gruesome imagery. Indeed, the lack of overall pattern can also be seen as relating to the way that the dead soldiers' body parts turn up randomly too—there's no pattern to when the farmers will find a piece of bone in the soil.
There are some rhymes in the poem though. For example, take the rhyme between "run" in line 8 and "guns" in line 9. The rhyme here feels bitterly ironic, a touch of lyricism in the moment the poem implies the soldiers' gruesome deaths. Another important rhyme comes in the final stanza, between "sung" and "tongues" in lines 19 and 21. The rhyme here feels more appropriate, given that it adds a touch of musicality to the speaker's description of the soldiers' "notes" finally being set free.
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“Mametz Wood” Speaker
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The speaker of "Mametz Wood" is relatively detached from the poem, never mentioned in the first-person or given any personal details. In a way, the speaker is not that important to the poem; instead, the poem focuses on the soldiers' experiences and the way that their body parts still turn up in the Mametz soil.
That said, Sheers has explained how the poem was inspired by his own visit to WWI battle sites and his understanding of the Mametz Wood story. Furthermore, the men who fought at Mametz Wood were from a Welsh Regiment—and accordingly were the same nationality as Sheers. In any case, the speaker is someone who either lives nearby or is visiting Mametz Wood and considering the land's macabre legacy.
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“Mametz Wood” Setting
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The setting of the poem is, of course, Mametz Wood—a real place in northern France that, in 1916, was the site of a particularly bloody episode of the First World War. The area contains both woods and treeless fields, where farmers now work the land, and, in doing so, occasionally unearth the bones of long-dead soldiers. Though the poem takes place in the present day, it thus remains deeply rooted in the past. Though the rest of the world has in its way moved on, the poem suggests that the earth cannot forget its trauma; even just "this morning" in the poem's present, 20 men were found buried in a long grave.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Mametz Wood”
Literary Context
Owen Sheers, born in 1974, is a British poet who also works as a TV presenter, playwright, and anthologist. Sheers's poems often engage with the natural world, focusing on human beings' relationship to their environments (see: "Winter Swans"). Indeed, he anthologized a collection of poems by various poets under the title A Poet's Guide to Britain, the chapter headings of which show his belief in the importance of poetry grounded in a sense of place: "London and Cities," "Villages and Towns," "Mountains and Moorland," "Islands," "Woods and Forest," and "Coast and Sea." This poem, of course, takes a more twisted and unsettling approach in its look at nature. Instead of praising nature, the poem seeks to give an honest and unflinching account of the way that conflicts like the First World War can affect the land.
Ultimately, "Mametz Wood" is a kind of contemporary take on the WWI poem, which is very much a genre in its own right (one which sits within war poetry more generally). Accordingly, it's worth comparing this poem to those famous poems written closer to the conflict, namely works by writers like Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen—the latter of whom is considered the leading figure in WWI poetry ("Exposure," "Anthem for Doomed Youth," "Dulce et Decorum Est," "Futility," "Strange Meeting").
Special mention must also be made to the Welsh war poet David Jones, who wrote an epic poem called In Parenthesis; Sheers was in part inspired through his work on a documentary about Jones and the war. A more contemporary comparison would be Jane Weir's poem "Poppies"—flowers which came to symbolize the First World War.
Historical Context
The historical context for "Mametz Wood" is two-fold. First of all, it's clear that the poem is written from a contemporary vantage point—the first line makes it obvious that many years have passed since the original battle in which these soldiers died. So, by and large, the poem is set around the time it was written. Indeed, part of its inspiration was Sheers's visits to WWI battle sites as part of a documentary about David Jones, a Welsh soldier (and poet) who served in that conflict. This aspect of the historical context serves to highlight the utter horror and wastefulness of war, the fact that body parts are still turning up a century later underscoring the sheer number of those who died.
Of course, the original conflict is an integral part of the historical context too. The First World War swamped the globe from 1914 to 1918 and remains one of the deadliest conflicts in history. Millions died in the fighting itself, and many more died from the fallout (through the 1918 flu pandemic and further political upheaval).
"Mametz Wood" relates to a very specific episode in the war. This was a 1916 conflict in the area of Mametz (in northern France) between the British Army and the Germans. This, in turn, was part of a wider offensive known as the Battle of the Somme (named after the wider French area) which killed around a million men. Those fighting in the Mametz Wood were from the Welsh Division of the British Army, and around 4,000 of those young Welshmen were killed.
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More “Mametz Wood” Resources
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External Resources
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Sheers's Inspiration — A short clip about a documentary that Sheers was involved in which focused on Welsh World War 1 poet David Jones.
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The Welsh and WWI — A documentary about the Welsh role in the British Army, as well as the Mametz Wood conflict itself.
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David Jones's "In Parenthesis" — An excerpt from an epic poem by David Jones, a Welsh war poet who fought in the Mametz Wood conflict and whose poetry inspired Sheers.
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Poems of the First World War — A valuable resource of WWI poetry selected by the Poetry Foundation.
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An Interview with Sheers — The poet talks about his life and work.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Owen Sheers
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