Ted Hughes: 'Bayonet Charge' Mr Bruff Analysis

Hello everyone and welcome to this video where I am going to analyze the poem 'Bayonet Charge' by Ted Hughes. As always, we will begin by looking at the poets themselves. And, as you know, when it comes to biographical details about a poet, we should only focus on what is important to help us understand the poem itself. Now, Ted Hughes is very famous as a womanizer and very famous for his tumultuous relationship with Sylvia Plath, but we don't need to focus on that when analyzing 'Bayonet Charge'. Some of the key things to think about about his life are the fact that he was born in 1930 and died in 1998.

This might come as a bit of a surprise considering that the poem 'Bayonet Charge' is essentially a First War World. war poem He grew up in the Yorkshire countryside from a very early age and throughout his adult life he was passionate about animals and nature and would become very famous, probably the most famous poet when it came to writing poetry about animals. He dedicated himself to poetry from a very young age. It's really interesting. He developed that passion for poetry in school and decided that he wanted to be a writer. But he came from a relatively poor family.

And that meant that he was going to struggle financially for much of his life, always looking for ways to make a little money. But, always, his number one priority was writing. And, as a result, he wrote a lot. He wrote poetry. He wrote plays. He wrote children's books. And he wrote Iron Man, which later became the movie Iron Giant. His father served in World War I. We'll talk about that a little more in a minute. Ted Hughes was obsessed with astrology, he was very passionate, he studied it very deeply, he believed in its effects, and he was named Poet Laureate in 1984 until his death in 1998.

And if you're studying this on the AQA board, you'll see that it seems that too They choose many of the poets who have been Poet Laureate. That's why it's interesting to think about the context of this poem. As I just said, one thing that might immediately surprise you is the period in which Hughes was alive. 'Bayonet Charge' is a poem about the First World War and compares very well with other First World War poetry or perhaps the much older 'Charge of the Light Brigade'. But Hughes himself wasn't even born when World War I took place, unlike Wilfred Owen, who we see here in the middle.

Wilfred Owen was a war poet who served and died in World War I, but Hughes writes about a war he did not personally experience. And that is a fact that is key to helping us understand the "

bayonet

charge

." So what was Hughes' motivation for writing a war poem about World War I? Well, there are three important factors to consider. Perhaps most important is the fact that Hughes's father had served in the war. This is Ted and his father. In fact, William Hughes was one of seventeen soldiers of the Lancashire Fusiliers who survived death at Gallipoli. And through Hughes' other poems, we are presented with a picture of his father as someone who actually spent the rest of his life emotionally paralyzed, beaten, and traumatized by what he had experienced in the First World War.

So, we could say that Hughes writes about World War I because, although he did not experience it personally, he felt its effects on his everyday life through his relationship with his father. There is an interesting part in his biography where we read that one of Hughes' friends from his early adult life remembers him wearing a World War I coat. He certainly was obsessed with World War I in the early part of his adult life. Secondly, Hughes grew up in West Yorkshire and himself said that he was "still reeling from the First World War". You see, the region lost so much population in the war that Hughes felt that "the entire region was mourning World War I." And finally Hughes wrote about poetry of the First World War because of his admiration for the poetry of Wilfred Owen.

He felt that Wilfred Owen's poetry was contemporary in the way Owen wrote about the events that so influenced Hughes's own existence. In his published letters from him, Hughes explained that "Owen, when I met his poems, came to represent my father's experience." We'll talk more about Wilfred Owen later. Now, "Bayonet Charge" is one of six poems included in Hughes' first published collection, "The Hawk in the Rain." Sylvia Plath, Hughes's wife, typed up the poems and entered them into a competition, and Hughes won the competition, resulting in the book's publication in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

Let's look at the poem itself. Now, I must say that this is an incredibly complex poem to understand. Many of Ted Hughes's poems are equally difficult, but this one is very complex, and its complexity is central to its main theme. And I'll talk to you about some of the deliberate complexity throughout this

analysis

, but first, let me give you an overview of what's going on in this poem. You can see on the screen that it is divided into three verses. In the first verse, a soldier wakes up to find himself charging towards the enemy with his gun and

bayonet

in hand.

In the second verse, he suddenly stops to contemplate what he is doing and why he does it. And in the third and final verse, the focus is on a hare that is caught in the middle of the battle. It is important to talk about the topic. Many of the poems you will study alongside this one have to do with war and conflict, but that is too vague and too general a topic. Now we need to try to make it a little more specific. So I looked at this poem a lot and came up with what I think is a unique angle.

I think this poem really focuses on the unspeakable horror of war. Ted Hughes is passionate about making it very clear that our ideas about what war is like are nothing like reality and that, in reality, war is so terrible that it cannot be adequately and accurately described in poetry or anywhere else. communication way. And if we take that idea, it's not just about “Oh yeah, war is bad” and “Isn't the soldier brave?” but it's about how the horror of war is indescribable, so that helps us with our

analysis

of the poem. As with all poetry analysis, it is important to analyze language, structure, and form to fully understand the poem.

And we'll start by looking at some of the general points related to structure that we see throughout the poem. When we look at the first word of the poem – and this is a very simple but valid point – the poem begins in the middle of the action with the word “suddenly.” Now, clearly something has happened before this moment, but we as readers are not aware of it and the result is that we are confused and perhaps unsure of what is happening, which of course is exactly how the soldier feels when He suddenly wakes up and

charge

s forward with his bayonet.

Ted Hughes uses many clever devices to make us feel somehow like the soldier himself feels, throwing us into the middle, thrusting us directly into the action, and unaware of the surrounding context that helps us relate to the soldier. . When we read the poem aloud, two things become very obvious. First, there is the enjambment found throughout the piece. Now, enjambment is the structural device that consists of making sentences span numerous lines. In other words, sentences do not end at the end of the line. They go to the next line. And we even see examples in the poem where there is an enjambment between verses.

So here we see that the sentence is 'Then the shots, the furrows threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flame and crawled into a threshing floor', but you can see that this sentence not only continues on the next line, but there is also a completely new verse. And that is the structural device of enjambment. Now, whenever a poet employs enjambment, it instantly creates a disjointed and disordered effect on the reader. And just as the soldier is thrown into a chaotic and disorderly event upon awakening in a battle charge, enjambment reflects this. Like the soldier, once again, the reader struggles to make sense of the chaos and disorder of the poem's structure.

Similarly, Hughes employs caesura. Now, caesura is when sentences end in the middle of a line, either with a period or a question mark. And here we see an example: was he the hand he pointed to in that second? He was running. The caesura is in the middle of the line. And there are two examples of caesura in the poem. And it's pretty interesting because they both take place in the second verse. And that second verse, of course, is about the soldiers stopping to consider what he's doing and why. So this caesura forces the reader, like the soldier, to stop in verse 2 and think.

Now, the caesura is combined with the enjambment to create this combined effect of this chaotic and difficult to follow structure. It's also interesting to think about repetition. So Ted Hughes was a masterful poet. Amazing. One of the most talented poets of all time. And it is interesting to note the repetition in lines 1 and 2 of the word "raw." So, within the first two lines of the poem we have a repeating word. Suddenly he woke up and was running: raw in hot khaki with raw stitching. Now the idea of ​​"ecru in hot khaki with raw seams" is clumsy in terms of expression.

If a student gave me that as a piece of writing, he would probably hand it back saying, “Look. Replace one of the words you have repeated.” But it was clearly a deliberate choice on Hughes' part, and there are two possible interpretations of what this is all about. When a poet repeats himself, it is different if it is a chorus and a kind of chorus. But whenever a poet seems to be in a very stressful moment in a poem and repeats a certain word, it can be used to show his difficulty in expressing the moment. If you look at my analysis of 'Extract from the Prelude', we saw the same thing: a poet with an immense vocabulary who chooses to repeat himself in a moment of great stress.

And this simple analysis is that the repetition reflects the shock that the soldier has upon waking up to this type of load. It's as if he stutters, struggling to articulate the moment, and our poet's repetition reflects that. And this interpretation would fit the theme. The war is so horrible that the soldier is unable to clearly express the moment. Instead, he is forced to stutter and repeat what he says. However, a much more sophisticated interpretation is possible. And this is something I spent hours researching, reading about and communicating with someone, the wonderful Tim Kendall from the University of Exeter, who wrote this book "Poetry of the First World War".

Or I edited it, I should say. Oxford University Press 2006. I have contacted Tim Kendall. And his ideas are fantastic, so I want to share them with you here. As I already mentioned, Hughes was a great admirer of Wilfred Owen, the First World War poet. Now, Wilfred Owen wrote only one poem about a bayonet charge, and that was a poem called "Spring Offensive." And we can look at the poem – and you can also Google it – and we can see that there are many similarities between this poem and Hughes' “Bayonet Charge.” Obviously, not only is the 'Bayonet Charge' theme exactly the same, take a look at the first two lines.

We see something very interesting in the first two lines where it says: Stopped in the shadow of a last hill, they fed and, lying down, were calm. As you can see, in the first two lines we have repeated words. And Owen’s “lie easy, be easy” is very similar to Hughes’ “raw in hot khaki with raw stitching.” It seems that this is an allusion to Wilfred Owen's poem, and is not just an example. This is a good theoretical piece for those of you who analyze texts. If you only have one example of something, then it is not enough.

But in reality, there are many similarities between the two poems. So if we look at the “Spring Offensive,” we have a lot of words that have to do with temperature. In 'Spring Offensive' we do have 'warm'; we have "sun," "hot," "burnt," "flames," and "cold." In “Bayonet Charge” we find similar words related to temperature: “molten”, “cold” and “flame”. In the poem "Spring Offensive" we have the phrase "and creeping." In Hughes' 'Bayonet Charge' we have 'and we crawl'. And in 'Spring Offensive' we have 'sunk and fallen', while in 'Bayonet Charge' we have 'submerged'. So, it's clear that there are deliberate similarities.

Now, there are numerous reasons to which we could attribute this. These are the early writings of Ted Hughes. Could it be that he wrote this as a kind of poetry exercise, copying the original style of 'Spring Offensive'? Obviously he did not know that these poems were going to be published. He tells in his book of letters that, when he found out that he had won the contest and that the poems were going to be published, he felt ashamed. He realized that he would like to go over them again. He often talks about the fact that he was strongly influenced by certain poets and reflected their style.

But it is interesting to think again about the theme of the poem. So let's think about this and try to figure out how this all works out.links to our theme: the inexplicable horror of war. Tim Kendall put it brilliantly. He said: “Hughes has to sound like Owen because everything he knows about a bayonet charge comes from Owen. “It is a second-hand poem about a second-hand experience.” And that explains it brilliantly, doesn't it? If this poem is about the inexplicable horror of war, then of course Ted Hughes will not be able to explain the horror of that war.

To explain and express the true horror of the moment, he is forced to turn to someone who was there: Wilfred Owen. That fits very well with our theme. War is so inexplicably horrible that even the talented Ted Hughes has to turn to the work of others to express it. Now, you might not make that reference to the allusion to Wilfred Owen's poetry in your GCSE exam. But it's just interesting because when we look at things like "raw" and "raw," we think why did Ted Hughes do that? Because this poem is incredibly complex. There are so many complex and intelligent images.

And then to have what appears to be such a weak repeat at first, we had to dig deeper into why that is. So whether or not you write about it in your exam, I think it's really helpful in helping us understand the poem. Therefore, the structural choices already detailed along with the linguistic choices made by the poet make this a very difficult poem to understand. Like most people, if you read the poem, you'll think a little, “Okay. I get it." But a lot of people would think, "What is this about? What's happening? I understand the basics (that it's about war), but I don't know how I could write about it on an exam." And that is a deliberate choice by Ted Hughes.

It makes the poem very difficult to understand. So, the difficulty in reaching the end of the poem can be considered to reflect the difficulty the soldier faces in reaching the point he wants to reach while running. Thus As he struggles laboriously through the mud, we, the readers, trudge through the poem's structural and linguistic mire. Hughes deliberately makes the poem difficult to read and even harder to understand, once again helping us empathize. with the situation the soldier finds himself in. Now, so far we can see how Hughes has used enjambment, caesura, repetition and allusion to The Poem of Wilfred Owen to present the sheer horror of war.

Now let's begin to dismantle some of the complex images that we find in the poem. My plan for these videos is to always tell you something that is different from what you are learning in school. So I'm not going to go through every image and explain it to you because I'm sure that's what a lot of the classwork is based on. But I'm going to tell you some of the things that I think are really significant. Let's start with these similes in the poem. I've highlighted them on the screen here and it doesn't take a genius to figure them out.

There are six similes in this poem, which is practically one per phrase. Now, each simile can be analyzed individually, but first let's stop and think about the combined effect of a poem full of similes. What is a simile? It is the comparison of one thing with another. It can be seen as a poet or writer saying, "Look, I can't explain this, but I can compare it to something else." In other words, “I don't know how to describe this moment. The best I can do is compare it to something I can describe.” So if a simile is used to make something understandable, then it stands to reason that the thing being described itself is impossible to describe.

So if I saw a monster or an alien, what did it look like? He would probably use similes again: “Well, he had, you know, hair that came out of his head like snakes. “It was as tall as a building.” – because I can't explain the thing itself. So I have to use similes to be able to articulate what it was like. And of course, just by knowing the number of similes in this poem, the overwhelming use of similes can be added to the list of devices Hughes is using to express the sheer horror of war. The war is so terrible that he cannot describe it.

He has to go back to using similes to say what it is like because he can't say what it is because it's so horrible. I think he's really, really smart. After he died in 1998, in his obituary, what was interesting about him... It was all interesting, but one part said that Hughes used "brutal, masculine handfuls of words." And this is clearly evident in 'Bayonet Charge', which is packed with complex and often confusing imagery. In a way, we don't need to analyze each and every individual image. Sometimes we need to select an image or a line simply to understand what is happening in the poem.

And other times we sense that the quotes have connotations beyond the literal meaning and are worth analyzing. Let's take a look at some examples: "Bullets hitting the belly in the air." Now it's interesting to think about the fact that the soldier is actually the only person in this poem. No mention of enemy soldiers. There are no bodies, which seems ambiguous. If this is his battlefield, one would think that he is very observant of everything around him. But we don't see any corpses. Some people have said, "Well, maybe this is all a dream." And that could certainly help explain the mysterious yellow hare in the last verse.

But the fact that there are no enemy soldiers helps us focus on what there is, which is nature. In this line, where we have the bullets hitting the belly in the air, we actually have an interesting personification of the air that her belly now has and the air has been taken out of her. And I think it's quite interesting to think about the effect that war has on nature. If we say that the air symbolizes nature, it is as much a victim of war as the soldier. And this consideration of nature certainly ties into Hughes's biographical background and his love of nature.

And, of course, he was a devout lover of all things outdoors. The focus on nature also helps us understand the reference to the “hare” in the last verse. So in the last verse we see this mention of a yellow hare, and this is very mysterious. There is no yellow hare. So what is all this? Again we might think, “Well, is he dreaming?” You might think that 'yellow' has a link to cowardice. The word "yellow" prepares the reader for the next word "scream," but there is no clear answer. What is clear is that the hare is another reference to nature, and the hare is a victim of this moment of war.

So not only did Hughes love animals, but later in his career he would become arguably the greatest animal poet of all time. And here the “hare,” like the previous “air,” reminds the reader of the impact that war has on nature. While nature affects war, it has no interest in war itself, as evidenced by the line in verse two: “in what cold clockwork of the stars and of the nations.” Knowing Hughes' passion for astrology, the poet is probably considering, by the stars, what this time of war has to do with astrology. Was it destined by the stars or was it the power on earth, the government, which is represented by the nations?

It seems that neither of them are interested in war, as we have "cold clockwork" that suggests that the soldier is simply a cog in a machine. Nobody cares what happens to him. So what does this poem really say about the causes of war? Do you remember that in Tennyson's “Charge of the Light Brigade” we read about the bravery of the condemned soldiers. The "bayonet charge" offers a strong comparison. While the Light Brigade wasn't there to wonder why, the soldier in 'Bayonet Charge' literally stops in verse two and begins to wonder what he is doing and why he is doing it.

The attitudes towards war are, therefore, great to compare between both poems. In verse one we read: 'The patriotic tear that had flowed from his eyes sweated like molten iron from the center of his chest.' This confusing simile is used to express the way in which the soldier's original patriotism has now been cast aside out of sheer panic. Consider the wide variety of negative language used in verse one: “hot,” “raw,” “stumbling,” “burdened,” “numb,” “crushed.” This is that brutal handful of words for which Hughes was noted. And the overload of emotional vocabulary is used to overwhelm the reader, reflecting how the soldier himself feels.

Perhaps the most complicated image of the poem can be found in that simile: "he was running like a man who has jumped in the darkness and runs listening to his steps for the sake of continuing to run." Now, what does this mean? Well, basically, it means that he was running like a man would if he were faced with the situation that the soldier himself faces. In other words, it's a meaningless line. It's the same as saying that he was eating a sandwich like someone would eat a sandwich. So why does Hughes make this line so complex?

Well, he wants the reader to struggle to read the poem, to stay stuck, overwhelmed by its complexity and confusion. And when we feel that, we feel what the soldier feels. So Hughes uses complex language to allow the reader to identify, in some way, with the soldier's experience. Very, very intelligent. In the final verse we find a fascinating line where the soldier passes by with thoughts of "King, honor, human dignity, etc." I love this word "etcetera". This is probably my favorite line in the entire poem. This last word, "etcetera", is used to mean "and so on." The tone is mocking.

He criticizes the patriotic values ​​that soldiers supposedly have. Hughes points out that these noble virtues of honor and human dignity, etc., mean little or nothing when you face the heat of battle. The "etcetera" essentially says "King, honor, human dignity, blah, blah, blah." We can read this as a harsh criticism of the war, especially when we remember the devastation it caused to both the people and the area around Hughes and nature. We can also see it as a challenge, a suggestion that the noble virtues of patriotism are millions of miles from the reality of war. The fact that the soldier is referred to as "he" throughout the poem supports the idea that this is a poem that is not about a specific soldier.

It's about all the soldiers. It is a general criticism of war. The last line of the poem is brutal. After asking him what he is doing and why, the soldier continues running. “Her terror of him is delicate dynamite.” So, despite his objections, the soldier has become a killing machine. This alliterative metaphor perfectly sums up the danger he can potentially inflict on others. Guys, I hope this was helpful. By no means have I covered every single image in the poem, but I hope I have given you a lot of evidence to analyze the language and structure of this poem and how it can be seen to describe not just war, or bravery, or what life is like. battle, but how war is so terrible that it cannot be adequately described.

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