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Hello welcome to another tutorial video. This time we’re going to be looking at Bayonet
Charge, which hopefully will close the conflict cluster for us. So we start off then with
structure and we’re looking first of all at the similar length of the stanzas, and
that gives us the idea that everything mentioned in each different foci are as important as
each other.
So in the first one we have a very physical feel, where you know how hot he is, how sweaty
he is, his actual actions, what he’s hearing around him, etc., the physical representation
of his patriotism.
Moving onto the second one then, it’s more mental. There we here that he is bewildered
and that he’s got these thoughts coming through and he’s actually got these fears
invading his mind as well as physical actions, but the focus has shifted slightly.
And then lastly we move onto some of the actions where the most important focus is down the
bottom here, where we’re looking at the philosophical elements; the reasons why a
person would do this or any soldier would this or not do certain things in this situation
and all these items are dismissed here in exchange really for the desperate need to
survive is what really gets him going.
So you’ve got the three different levels and they’re represented in the three stanzas
and that’s why they’re all as equal as each other. We’ve also got the hyphen or
dash, whichever you prefer to call it, used to show dramatic jump in focus, that’s used
quite a lot. So here we hear about him running and then it shifts to the physicality. Here
we hear about him listening or being aware of this and then how he just kind of quickly
pacing through. Here we hear about his patriotism and then we see like he just suddenly nearly
stops, or really slows down and then it switches again to his mind, so the dash there really
allows us to switch focus dramatically, very quickly, and keep the pace, because there’s
a lot of pace here in the poem. It’s trying to get across that this is all happening in
a few seconds and that’s conveyed to us through the fact that there’s very few full
stops to allow us to keep going.
The last point I want to make on this – even though there are dozens more , or actually
there’s several more – is starting with ‘suddenly’. Starting with ‘suddenly’
is very dramatic, it’s a very fast opening that puts the reader in the scene straight
away and the immediacy and danger that he is under is given to us all in one word without
needing to expand upon. And when we do expand upon it we know his mentality from the off,
which allows us then to change and focus on the change in mentality. So starting that
way really sets us up for what comes next.
So we move on then to the meanings. We’ve got the tense situation on the battlefield.
He is being shot at, he’s running at a hedge that’s ‘dazzled with rifle fire’, so
he’s being shot at and all his men are being shot at and a lot of them are being killed.
There’s something to be said here for Ted Hughes’ dad, who survived the certain battle
and he was one of only like 15 or 17 survivors – I know the numbers, I think I remember
the number was less than 20 – of a certain war, and Ted Hughes commented quite often
on how it always lingered with him, so we can imagine that he’s bringing his father’s
stories, they’re actually coming through here and his experiences and that makes it
all the more powerful, all the more real, even though Hughes isn’t experiencing this
himself, we can imagine his father did and those stories and tales were passed onto him.
So the tense situation on the battlefield there and then the impending death available
on the battlefield. You know every moment we’ve got it there with the hare, which
has been injured and is about to die and its mouth is wide open and silent and its eyes
standing out, it’s just about to die. So yes, the tense situation and why the tension’s
actually there, the reminder of death and the death of people around him.
We see as well the instincts of him stopping. You know obviously that’s the worst time
for him to choose to stop, so we know that’s actually done by instinct, and then he plunges
past him when he’s got the reminder of death, it just makes him pick up and get a move on
again, so he just flies onto the instincts there of human nature, the wanting to survive
highlighted.
We’ve got the futility of war in that this is not really how he should be living his
life and he’s got this rifle ‘numb as a smashed arm’, which shows how unnatural
it is to him and he has got this, you know, he’s had to change himself, he’s got almost
like an iron-like sensor in his heart, whereas anyone normal or anyone who wasn’t trained
to fight, etc. probably would have found this even more difficult, you know, may have given
up in some way and that touches upon the futility of war because someone here has to die. Even
if he survives, then – and we champion that – we have to remember at the same time,
whoever he is charging at with the bayonet has to die for him to stay alive, or at least
the majority of them have to die for him to stay alive, so that’s highlighting the futility
of war.
And then we’ve got the real reasons to fight. Here when he actually stops and thinks about
what’s going on and the situation he’s in, it gives us one focus but then down at
the end here, ‘he plunged past with the bayonet toward the green hedge. King, honour,
human, dignity, etcetera Dropped like luxuries in a yelling alarm’. So these are things
that people would fight for, you know, the idea that ‘well, you know, we need to uphold
human dignity because the other side’s evil and, you know, we have to do the right thing.
Here you’ve got the idea of why it’s honourable to fight for your country and obviously the
King – it’s really champion to fight for your King or your Queen or, you know, your
country, etc., etc. so all these ideas that some people hold, really at certain points
what Ted Hughes could be saying is that there comes a point when actually for some people
it’s about life or death, wanting to live, wanting to die, and that’s why they kill
and fight in war. At this given moment obviously, it’s not necessarily the reason why they
get into the war in the first place but in this situation it’s very relevant that those
aren’t his real reasons to fight. And the use of the word ‘etcetera’ after that,
just kind of dismisses them, just kind of like ‘oh yeah, a long list, blah, blah,
blah’ and that’s what this etcetera does there, but obviously does it a lot better.
So we move on then to the images. It’s very interesting to see him here at the beginning
stumbling, because when we actually get the idea of him running there, well that he’s
carrying a gun, etc., it’s not this heroic gallop across a field, it’s this awkward,
bumpy stumbling, which again just really lowers and it’s actually supported by the fact
that he’s really sweaty and his clothes are raw-seamed, etc., it really lowers any
of the glory in here. This is very messy, this is very uncomfortable, this is almost
like - I wouldn’t say inhuman, but it’s not really what humans were designed to do.
So we’re looking there at something that gives a very strong image of him being in
a less than optimal situation.
The image of him also listening between the footfalls, that’s really good because it
gives us a clear way of seeing his thought process or how much this means to him here
or how much he actually stops, because in stopping and listening to his own feet; or
at least alluding to doing that or making it seem like that, we get to take in his situation
as he takes in this situation, which makes the reader empathise more.
Lovely image of the hare. So the hare shoots out of this furrow, you know that’s covered
in shots, and it’s presumably been shot and it’s just about to die and it’s crawling
through and it ‘crawled to the threshing circle and then its mouth wide Open silent,
its eyes standing out’ and it’s dropping dead or just dropped dead, and that gives
us the image that we need of death, which actually shoots him into action and plunges
him back into action.
And we’ve got the image of patriotism, because we’ve got the idea here – even though
it’s dismissed in the final stanza – we’ve still got the idea being represented to us
of the patriotic tear, it could look like he’s crying and we could take it he’s
crying because he’s so scared, he’s crying because he’s so worried, but it could be
taken as well that, you know, ‘I’m desperate to kill for my King and my country and my
honour’, etc., etc., and it’s further emphasised by the molten iron from the centre
of his chest, linking to his heart and the lengths he will go to and how strong he will
be for all those causes, etc., if they are what he is fighting for, if we look at it
that way at least for that section.
Looking then at the language. We’ve got a great use of techniques. So we’ve got
‘he lugged a rifle as numb as a smashed arm’. We’ve got the simile there. That’s
really important because it gives us the de-humanisation of his body. Part of the extension of his
body now is this killing machine, and although we can kill with our bare hands, obviously
we’re not going to kill as efficiently as a rifle, and so it’s just something that
he drags around with him. If we had a smashed arm then again we wouldn’t be optimum in
our performance or in our actions and having the gun with him is a hindrance on his humanity,
not necessarily on his moving because he’s trained to move with that, but on his humanity
and the fact that he’s going to kill people is definitely a reduction of his humanity.
Other techniques then. We’ve got lovely alliteration at the end. ‘His terror’s
touchy dynamite’, the thing that will set him off is really, really emphasised. We’ve
also got a list of three: King, honour, human dignity’, which emphasises all the things
and dismisses them all at the same time and we’ve also got ‘rolled like a flame’,
which gives the idea of the speed. And there’s loads of other things that you can pick out
there for the techniques.
One that I liked in particular was ‘the shot-slashed’. I really liked that because
it refers here to the rabbit, but the kind of the cutting movement that goes along with
it, or the cutting emphasis that actually comes along with it, is also like a cutting
into his humanity, because he’s in a situation where he could die, he’s looking at a hare
that’s just died and the life has been slashed out of it and he’s in a situation where
his humanity is being slashed out of him because of what he actually has to do. Furthermore
I think it links to the people that would be around, because he would be looking around
or he’d be running past and he’d be finding an immense amount of numbers, a very large
amount of numbers of people who are also completely riddled with bullets and dead, although this
is what he chooses to focus on…or this is what his mind invites him to focus on at the
given time.
The use of the word ‘plunged’ is also very strong because it shows the desperation
and shows how necessary his next move is and that he plunges, like he’d dive into a pool;
you just completely throw and immerse yourself into something; and I think it’s really
important that we pick out all the aural descriptions here, the things that actually appeal to our
ears. So when we start at the beginning we’ve got the rifle fire, we’ve got the sound
of that and the ‘bullets smack the belly out of the air’, so a way of reading this
really would mean that the air is really being squeezed, or just kind of frantically pressed
with all these bullets, so that’s one way of looking at it. So it’s again things that
we’re hearing and then later on we’ve got him listening to his footsteps, with the
idea of him listening to his footsteps and then the ‘yelling alarm’ and the ‘blue
crackling in the air’, so there’s lots of description to actually get the sound across
to us. And we’ve got the lovely contrast where we’ve got the silence of the hare
as it’s dying or just died and that’s important because that’s what he sees and
maybe that’s one of the things that actually gives him the contrast. For all the shock
and suffering and horror he’s in, the power of the silence, just seeing something’s
life end in front of you, obviously through its silence as well, really makes him want
to live another day and take charge and make sure that he does actually get to do stuff.
So the effect on the reader then? Well we’re looking at trench warfare so we’re thinking
about how de-humanising this was, what a great loss of life was actually involved in it and
obviously the sacrifice of those who were in it. It makes us thing about also what gives
us courage, you know, what would make us do certain things at certain times, like seeing
the hare dead here made this man actually get running and going and we think about the
detachment that comes across to us at inopportune times. Sometimes when people are having a
go at us we can just detach, or when we’re watching something violent we can just detach.
So here in this situation, although it doesn’t seem like the person has chosen to detach,
in the middle here he detaches as well, so it just gets us thinking about why people
detach from certain situations and part of that is to do with, you know, so we can deal
with it better. Part of it’s to do with, well we’re not really caring, and then part
of it’s to do with the fact that sometimes it’s the best way we can manage to not only
deal with something, but live with it. So detaching at the moment is a better way of
living with something, as well as just getting through it at that moment.
So yeah, a really, really excellent, really vivid deep poem that’s worth reading many
times over and I hope that was useful.