by Liz Allen

Created on: August 12, 2011

Owen Sheers wrote the poem “Mametz Wood” after visiting the site of a World War I battlefield on the Somme in France. He made the visit on the occasion of the eighty-fifth anniversary of a battle that took place there in 1916. About four thousand soldiers of the 38th Welsh Division lost their lives during the battle. Walking through the field, Sheers noticed that shells, pieces of barbed wire and fragments of human bones were still to be found coming to the surface after so many years. He also saw a newspaper article with a photograph of a war grave that had recently been discovered near

Mametz Wood; he found the photograph very moving. His experiences during that visit to France inspired him to write the poem “Mametz Wood.” 

In the opening lines of “Mametz Wood,” Sheers reveals that the site of the battle reverted to farmland and that the farmers found remains of soldiers' bodies long after the war had ended. “The wasted young” shows that most of those who died had barely reached adulthood. Sheers comments in line 3 that the farmers “tended the land back into itself,” trying to rid the fields of associations of war and allow it to be restored to its original state. 

Reminders sprang up, however, in the form of fragments of corpses. In the second stanza, Sheers uses metaphors to describe these fragments, starting with a “chit of bone” in line 4; a chit can be a brief note or letter, so the image created is one of a small piece that nevertheless conveys a message. In the same line a shoulder blade is described with the metaphor “a china plate,” as though it is hard but also fragile and perhaps precious. In line 5 a finger is merely a “relic,” as it has no use now. Sheers uses enjambment to link line 5 to line 6 and extend slightly the metaphor in “the blown / and broken bird's egg of a skull.” The image of the shattered bird's egg emphasises the fragility of the skull, and the alliteration with the “b” sound intensifies the description. 

The human remains are “all mimicked now in flint,” a phrase where the assonance of the short “i” adds life to the image at the beginning of the third stanza. Sheers echoes the alliteration of the previous stanza in the phrase “breaking blue in white,” describing the colours of the fragments that are pushing through the surface of the earth. The last two lines

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