Mametz Wood

'For years afterwoods the farmers found them-the wasted young'

• It is about the soldiers bodies being unearthed from the ground
• 'years' shows how soldiers are often forgotten and they can't be at peace until they are remembered and acknowledged
• It is about the futility of the battle which is shown by 'wasted'

'they were told to walk,not run, /towards the nesting machine guns'

• Third person shows that the narrator is telling the story on behalf of the soldiers as they never had chance to live and tell what happened which links to 'absenst tongues' on the last line
• Specific detail 'not run' also build to the idea that the narrator knows more about what happened than the reader and makes it more shocking and intruguing 

'This morning twenty men buried in one long grave, a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm'

• It was inspired by Sheers' trip to the Somme where he was involved in a documentary about two welsh writers who fought at Mametz Wood
• When he was visiting a grave was uncovered and contained 20 soldiers who were linking arms 
• The welsh soldiers at the battle suffered heavy looses 
• There were reminders of the battle such as bone and barbed wire

'A chift of bone,the china plate of a shoulder blade'

• Metaphor presents life as fragile and dehumanises the soldiers

'like a wound working a foreign body'

• Consonnance personifies the earth and makes it sound like it's healing itself

'in boots that outlasted them'

• Personification suggets that the men where killed so young that everything arounf them has lasted longer

• Regular three line stanzas mimick the order to 'walk not run'
• Enjambment 'Their skeletons pasued mid dance macabre / in boots that outlasted them' this creates the image of being broken 
• It is structure to end with the soldiers regaining some of their humanity 'As if the notes they had sung have only now on this unearthing slipped from their absent tongues' to create a sense that they have been remembered and can now be at peace