Bayonet Charge

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  • Created by: loupardoe
  • Created on: 11-01-17 07:47

summary

  • a soldier runs through rifle fire holding a rifle with bayonet attached
  • the soldier becomes confused and pauses for a split second, unsure of what he is doing
  • the soldier notices a hare in the battlefield, which thrashes about, dying
  • the soldier stops thinking and resumes the charge

key aspects

  • erratic structure in terms of rhythm and line length to mirror the soldier's movements
  • sound features like alliteration and short vowels evoke the chaos of the battlefield
  • uses a range of powerfu and evocative imagery

key setting- a first world war battlefield

  • evokes the sights, sounds and sensations of the battlefield through the soldier's experience of it
  • shocking experience that we, like the soldier, are plunged into with the opening 'suddenly' and this sense of confusion and disorientation is present throughout
  • details are described, but we are never given a picture of the whole setting
  • this is deliberate, as part of the soldier's overwhelming bewilderment
  • also carefully uses structure in a way that mimics this confusion, with uneven line lengths, irregular punctuation and unfinished sentences contributing to this effect
  • in the first stanza, hughes describes 'a green hedge/ that dazzled with rifle fire' as a kind of marker that the soldier is 'stumbling...towards'
  • the verb 'dazzled' is an usually positive-sounding choice and depicts the hedge as lit up by the firing of the rifles, although it does convey something that is hard to look at and perhaps reduces the soldier's vision
  • in the final stanza, he pungles once more 'toward the green hedge', so we can see that Hughes repeats the phrase to show the soldier's return to the same path

key technique- imagery

  • hughes's use of imagery in this poem is varied and connects the battlefield to a range of more common, everyday objects and ideas, such as 'clockwork', perhaps because he is writing for a 1950's audience and not one recently returned from the First World…

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