Special request: Siegfried Sassoon's 'In Me Past, Present, Future Meet'

A brief break from the AQA anthology to investigate another war poem that a reader of the blog has asked me to look at. It's not one that often appears in the anthologies, and you can see why; it's opaque on first reading, and intensely symbolic, working through a series of complex metaphors to put across its ideas.It also doesn't, at first, seem to be much about the war. You can see the full text here.

The poem is intensely introspective, contemplating the speaker's state of mind. The speaker may be the poet, of course--and people are often eager to attribute this poem as an autobiographical revelation by Sassoon--but it is worth being careful about assuming that a first person speaking voice represents the poet, when it may equally be a representation of a particular state of mind.

With this caveat, let's look at the poem. It consists of two six-line stanzas, rhymed ABBABA CDCDEE in an eight-syllable line. It has something of the feeling of a sonnet in its brevity and concision, but of course is two lines short, and is also in iambic tetrameter rather than iambic pentameter. Nonetheless the air of a sonnet remains, in the complex interlaced rhyme structure and the concluding couplet. The second stanza could easily be the sestet of a Shakespearean sonnet, and the first stanza only needs two more lines rhymed AB to give is a perfect ABBAABBA octet. It is also a poem which asks a question or raises a problem, which we perhaps expect to have resolved in the couplet at the end, as it is so often resolved in the Shakespearean sonnet.

Given Sassoon's facility with verse, the near-sonnet is clearly a deliberate choice of form, which sets up certain expectations in the reader, and unbalances them slightly. The shorter lines make it appear concise and no-nonsense, and tend to reinforce the assertive statements made. Compare, for instance, Sassoon's original lines:

In me, past, present, future meet
to hold long, chiding conference.
My lusts usurp the present tense
And strangle Reason in his seat.

with my own version in iambic pentameter below. I have kept the rhyme and the meaning, but see how the longer line makes a huge difference to the tone of the poem:

In me, past present, future now do meet
To hold a long and chiding conference.
My lusts, I find, usurp the present tense
And surely strangle reason in his seat.

So Sassoon's choice of tetrameter adds real speed and pace to the lines, creating an almost breathless effect of urgency and passion.

Statesmen at the Versailles conference

Personification is a key technique in the poem. Past, present and future seem like people, able to meet and take action. Likewise Lust, reason and love are as vital in action as the imagined 'cave-man' or 'seer'. The speaker sees himself as like a battleground, or perhaps like a war between different and opposed concerns (one wonders if the speaker is indeed War personified). The past, the present and the future meet in the speaker, like politicians negotiating a peace-plan--though it is a 'chiding' conference, with people telling each other off, so not very peaceful. The image does not suggest that the past, present and future will easily come to terms.

Of course, this central opening image is a truth. In any human being past, present and future meet, as we bring our memories of the past and our hopes for the future to deal with our lived experience in the present. However, in this situation, the elements of personality do not behave themselves. they do not submit to the 'chiding' conference designed to resolve the speaker's internal feelings of conflict, but 'usurp' the present and transgress the boundaries that the future sets. In  other words, the speaker's lived experience--his past--that he brings to the 'conference' overwhelm him. His desires are so powerful that they invade the present--not only the present time, but the 'present tense'--that is the moment that he is speaking,  so that 'I loved' becomes 'I love' or 'I kissed' becomes 'I kiss'. Of course the poem itself enacts this, being cast in the present tense throughout.


The poet clearly feels intellectually that his desires should be suppressed--they offend against reason--but they are so strong that they overwhelm and kill reason ('strangling' in particular suggests that they stop reason from speaking). Reason is here seen as like a monarch enthroned (and of course the phrase 'the seat of reason' is a commonplace) whose authority is usurped by the rebellious desires of the speaker. Interestingly in the ancient world the heart was seen as the seat of reason (Aristotle thought of it as the seat of intelligence), whereas in the modern world this is generally thought of as the brain. As though liberated by the violence done to reason, 'lusts' transform into 'loves' which leap through the imagined restrictions of the future 'to dance', liberated, 'dream-enfranchised'--that is made free in a dream.

In the second stanza, the conflict within the speaker's mind is made even more explicit, with a series of contrasts between the 'cave-man' and the 'seer', Apollo and Abraham, and the tiger and the rose. These revelations are apparently enough to make the reader 'tremble' with self-knowledge.

The series of oppositions created is interesting. The cave-man seems to be an image of unabashed masculinity--brutal, physical, aggressive--that is certainly how cave-men would be seen at the time of writing (see the copy of a 1909 image of a caveman). It is reminiscent of the kind of image portrayed of the Germans on posters such as 'Destroy this mad Brute'. However, here the cave-man is not violent, but tenderly 'clasps' the seer, the prophet. The violent side of the speaker's nature, in other words, embraces the more mystical side.

The contrast between Apollo and Abraham is more complex. Garlanded Apollo is singing, as befits his status of the God of music and poetry. However, his singing falls literally upon deaf ears, as Abraham, the Old Testament prophet who represents the Judaeo-Christian moral code, perhaps, will not hear him.

The image is reminiscent of Wilfred Owen's great poem 'The Parable of the Old Man and the Young' which re-tells the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son Isaac, placing young men at war in the place of Isaac and politicians in the role of Abraham. In the original Old Testament story, Abraham is
told to sacrifice his son by God, and obeys, taking Isaac up a hill and building a pyre on which to sacrifice him. As he is about to cut his child's throat, he is prevented by the Angel of God, who tells him that he has pleased God by his obedience, and he is told to sacrifice a Ram who is caught by its horns in a thicket nearby. The story is a way of explaining why the Jewish people distinguished themselves from those peoples living around them who practised child sacrifice, and is also widely used in Christian theology as an analogy to Christ's sacrifice on the cross. In Owen's version, Abraham will not listen to the angel of God who tells him to spare his child and  'sacrifice the Ram of Pride instead'. Instead, it concludes, 'the old man would not so, but slew his son / And half the seed of Europe, one by one'. This horrific image may well lie behind Sassoon's idea of Abraham. In other words, Apollo's message of joy falls on deaf ears and poetry wastes its time trying to change the mind of people who think in this way. However, of course, it is not as simple as being able to say that Sassoon dislikes Judaeo-Christian religious thinking and wants to be a carefree poet, for both characters are described as 'in me'--in other words Sassoon himself is not only the poet and the seer, he is also the caveman and the Old Testament, punitive prophet.

Sassoon with Stephen Tennant (left)

At this point, it is tempting to think that the conflict that is evident in the poem is about the conflicts in Sassoon's own life. He certainly was conflicted in his attitude towards the war, known as 'Mad Jack' for his self-destructive heroism, but writing a public anti-war statement which risked imprisonment and court-martial for treason. He was also conflicted in his sexuality. Sassoon lived at a time when homosexuality was illegal, but its nonetheless thought to have had several fairly well-documented affairs with men, and was certainly at different times tormented with the ways in which his sexuality was denied free expression through the prevailing mores of his time. Perhaps this is what the poem indicates through the strongly contrasting images that run throughout it. The idea of 'lusts' overcoming rationality, and dreaming of a future when his loves would be free to express themselves in liberty would certainly mesh well with this reading. The final metaphor, 'in me the tiger sniffs the rose' is one which gently and humorously indicates how his powerful masculinity is drawn to sensuousness and delicacy. The use of the word 'sniffs' suggests a hesitancy or experimentation, and also a subtlety in the 'tiger' nature he describes.

The poem is strikingly reminiscent of the poem 'Peace' found in Sassoon's diary on 2nd April 1916:

In my heart there's cruel war that must be waged
In darkness vile with moans and bleeding bodies maimed;
A gnawing hunger drives me, wild to be assuaged,
And bitter lust chuckles within me unashamed.

This imagery of conflict and desire, the personification and wildness seem to mirror 'In Me'. However, 'Peace' is significantly more negative. If you compare the two poems, 'In Me' seems by contrast to be calm and resolved. The final lines in particular invite the reader to realise that the experience Sassoon describes is a universal experience. No-one is without conflict, no-one is without these 'elements' of humanity. If the reader is made fearful by the self-knowledge of this, then this is part of the human condition.

Adrian Caesar's Taking it Like a Man is an interesting examination of this aspect of Sassoon's experience, and he goes through in detail some of the ways in which the conflict is shown in his other poems. He also uses evidence from Sassoon's diaries to explain how Sassoon regarded his own sexuality. He speaks of a 'spiritual sickness' and says that he is 'self-poisoned' and 'self-imprisoned'. What is interesting is that in 'In Me', this kind of negative language is not present. There is certainly negativity in the 'chiding conference' and violence in 'strangle' but in general the images are positive ones: 'leap', 'dance', 'clasps' 'chanting' all imply  energy and activity but not poison or imprisonment. The openness suggested by the embrace of 'clasps' and the exploratory 'sniff' of the tiger suggests that Sassoon at this point in his life was able to admit the conflicts that he felt, but also feel that they were not destructive--but simply part of the 'elements' that made up being a man.

AQA Power and Conflict: 'Poppies'

This poem discusses the effects of war upon those who are left behind, and the impact of waiting--and grieving--particularly on women. It was written by Jane Weir at the request of Carol Ann Duffy, the poet Laureate, to commemorate those lost in war, and came out of her reading in the writing of women from the First and Second World Wars. As she says in an interview where she discusses the genesis of the poem., the language in the poem reflects her work as a textile designer, and in many ways this poem is one which deliberately creates a gulf between the 'domestic' world of the woman speaker and her son's more 'masculine' world of war.

The title, 'Poppies' immediately summons up one of the most potent symbols of warfare in the twentieth century--the poppies worn on Remembrance Day as a symbol of the fallen. As a brutal fact, poppies grow most readily on freshly turned earth (thus they grow in wheatfields, where the earth is ploughed each year) and they grew profusely on the graves of men who died in Flanders and were buried near the battlefields there in World War 1. Behind this poem lie many others with a similar theme, most particularly the poem 'In Flanders Fields' by John McCrae, which is credited with first associating the idea of poppies with the fallen, and ultimately for starting the Royal British Legion Campaign, through the work of Moina Belle Michael.

In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker describes saying farewell to her son three days before

'Armistice Sunday'. She places a poppy on his lapel before he leaves the house, and this turns his departure implicitly into a leave-taking before he goes to war, though this may simply be an extended metaphor as he is wearing a blazer, more normally associated with school uniform than army uniform. This initial confusing image is part of a confusion sustained throughout the poem--is the speaker mourning the death of her child, or simply her fears for him? Has he gone to war, or is he simply leaving home for the first time? There is little explicit indication of which reading is correct--the focus is on the mother's sadness at parting, and her hopes and fears for her child. This may come out of Weir's own sensitivity to the suffering of women who have lost children to war--it is as though she is unwilling to claim, even through a poem, that she has genuinely shared in the suffering and bereavement of which she writes. The best that she can do is to imagine it as vividly as possible.

The poem is precisely placed 'Three days before Armistice Sunday'. Armistice Sunday is actually something of a misnomer, conflating 'Remembrance Sunday' and 'Armistice Day'. The Armistice was the formal ending of World War 1, on the 'eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour', and in 1919 the date of November 11th was declared an official day of commemmoration as a result. As time went on, this was replacd, for practical purposes, with the use of the Sunday nearest to November 11th, which became known as 'Remembrance Sunday'. The omission of the word 'Remembrance' and its replacement with the more formal term 'Armistice' calls up the omitted word to the reader's mind, in a form of litotes, the rhetorical figure where you describe something through its opposite or its omission (as in 'he's not all bad'). This also makes the placing of the poem in time more uncertain; three days before Armistice Day would be the 8th November; three days before Remembrance Sunday could be within several days of this.

The form of the poem is fairly loose. Lines are not regular or metrical, but seem to be about ten syllables long, varying from 13 to 7, with the majority 9 or 11. There are often strong caesuras in the middle of lines, emphasising this sense that it is prosaic, and conversational, and also emphasising the enjambement as sentences move between lines. The speaker addresses the reader directly, using 'you', but it is clear that this is also an address to her son, and references to him occur throughout the poem to establish the relationship.

There are a series of possessive phrases which knit together the second person possessive pronoun 'your' to particularise it and make it the speaker's son:: 'your lapel', 'your blazer', 'your shirt's', 'your nose', 'your hair', your bedroom', 'your playground voice'. These references also make 'you' into an everyman figure--in some ways this could be anyone's son, something that the poet refers to when she speaks of the warm reception this poem has had from the mothers of fallen soldiers. They are also opposed and matched by a similar number of references to the first person possessive pronoun: 'my hand', 'my nose', 'my fingers', 'my words', 'my stomach', which similarly both particularises the speaker and makes her into a symbol of mothers everywhere.

I

n the second section of the poem, the detail of the farewell is lovingly dwelt upon. The speaker recouns how she took bits of cat hair off her son's jacket by rolling sellotape round her hand to create a sticky surface to which they would adhere--a very trivial domestic gesture designed to summon up the everyday (and the modern). She neatens his shirt collar, a maternal gesture, and resists her face softening' (presumably because she wants to be 'brave' and not show strong emotion). There is a sense that she feels this might embarrass her son--she wants to make a tender gesture, something from childhood, but rubbing her nose across his in an 'eskimo kiss' is 'resisted' just as she resists the desire to run her fingers through his hair. That the hair is described as 'gelled blackthorns' both suggests that he is a teenager, and implies that he is prickly and would not welcome the gesture. It might also suggest that he is not yet in the army, as the army has strict regulations about hair, and gelled spikes would be frowned upon. 

The mother feels that there are words that she would like to say, but they are 'flattened, rolled, turned into felt'. Here there is a pun between the feelings which are felt and the name of the compressed material that she describes, 'felt'. Her feelings have been turned into the past tense, they have been 'felt', they cannot be present-tense feelings as she has to suppress them. Here the enjambement goes between sections, 'slowly melting' on the next line looking almost as though it has dripped down from the line above. The idea of 'melting' is associated with frozen emotions--her feelings are so warm that she finds it difficult to keep up her brave face, though the first line of the next section asserts boldly 'I was brave'.

The image in the third section of the poem--the world as a 'treasure chest', 'overflowing' suggests the possibilities that the world offers to the child--the reasons why he wants to leave home. The world appears rich and full to him, and he is 'intoxicated', or drunk, at he thought of the possibilities. The use of the word 'intoxicated' may also suggest that the speaker feels that he is not quite responsible for his own actions--his desire to leave and his excitement is so strong that he may not have considered all the reprecussions of what he is doing, perhaps.

When the son leaves, the mother describes how she 'released a song bird from its cage'. Although this is described as a simple truth, a literal reality of liberating a pet: 'I went into your bedroom', the image seems strongly symbolic. LIke the 'dove' that flies to the churchyard, the caged bird seems to represent her son and his desire for freedom.

The dove, of course, is a universal symbol for peace, and the speaker's description of it makes her feel anxious, as it suggests again how peace and war are intertwined. She seems to have rushed out of the house (as her son did?) unprepared 'without a winter coat', which suggests anxiety or haste, and her visit to the war memorial and its tracing of its letters strongly suggest that she is expecting her son's name to be engraved there. Leaning against it, she imagines that her body against the upright memorial forms the V-shape of a wishbone, promising perhaps a wish if she breaks her pose. The dove becomes something that looks like a fiction, a decoration, as she thinks back to her son's childhood. If you take the reading that this woman has merely sent her son off to school, then of course her desire to 'hear your playground voice catching on the wind' is a real one--she is hoping to hear her son playing happily at school. It seems more likely, though, that she is thinking of the past, and that she is wishing that he were again a small child, and therefore safe from the perils of war.

The semantic field of the poem is interesting, because it is strongly reflective of the writer's interest in textiles. Images throughout focus around clothing, sewing, or material of one kind or another: 'lapel', 'bias binding', 'blazer', bandage', 'shirts', 'felt', 'tucks, darts, pleats', 'stitch'. To start with, these are literal--it might be significant that the speaker notices the bias binding on the blazer, but it is not symbolic in itself--but as the poem progresses, the language transforms into the metaphorical, first as words are described as 'turned into felt', then as the speaker's nervousness is described as 'my stomach busy/ making tucks, darts, pleats' until finally the dove becomes 'an ornamental stitch' in the final section. Even her action of walking along the edge of the wall is turned into a work associated with clothing: 'skirting'.

This seems to be part of the central division in the poem, between home and warfare. the idea presented thoughout--that the man who goes to war was once a child, and that the memories of him as a child are still powerful to his mother--is put across by an opposition between the domestic and the warlike, so that opposed to this intensely homely semantic field is one of battle, injury and conflict: 'Armistice Sunday', war graves', 'spasms', 'blockade', 'bandaged', 'rounded up', 'steeled', graze', 'brave', 'reinforcements'. Often, the writer juxtaposes words from both fields, or describes something domestic with words that we might normally associate with conflict. Thus, 'reinforcements' become only a scarf or gloves to protect against cold weather, and the 'blockade' is simply the edging of a coat.

AQA Power and Conflict: 'Remains'

The poem 'Remains' arose when Simon Armitage took part in a documentary for Channel 4 in 2007 called The Not Dead  based on the emotional experiences of soldiers returning from conflict, and the post-traumatic stress that they suffered as a result both of what was done to them and what they did to others. The programme inspired a volume of poetry of the same name, written not solely about the experience of conflict, but about the flashbacks and feelings that the soldiers endured when returning to civilian life. The title The Not Dead sums up the key issues that it examines: these men are not dead, they are not traditional casualties of war, but they are not truly alive any more either--they are caught in a sense of limbo between their old lives and their new lives. As ex-soldiers they cannot fit comfortably into civilian life, nor can they return to the life of war. 'Remains' itself is based on the account of a soldier who fought in Basra, and it gives a voice to someone troubled by his actions in war, who re-lives the incident in his mind again and again. It is powerfully linked to Shakespeare's Macbeth in its description of guilt. The title 'Remains' refers both to the 'remains' of the body that the soldier describes, and to the guilt that remains in his mind. He wants to forget the experience, but is unable to do so, the visible 'blood-shadow' that it leaves on the road paralleled by the blood-shadow on his mind.

The poem opens as though half-way through a conversation: 'On another occasion', making it clear that the incident of which the solider speaks was one among many. This conversational tone gives the impression of a dramatic monologue, and it certainly appears to both have ironic elements and also reveal more about the speaker and his state of mind than he perhaps intends. It additionally gives us, as readers, the sense of eavesdropping on what may be a private conversation, something reinforced by the confessional tone later in the poem. The speaker describes an incident when he was sent out with other soldiers to 'tackle' looters in Basra. He shoots one of the looters, and the event comes back to his mind again and again as he thinks through the experience. If the looter was armed, then his action is a justified act of self-defence. If he was not, then he has murdered someone. It is likely that his action would have been seen as justified by the army, given that the looter was ‘probably armed’, but his ambivalent feelings about it are made clear in the repeated phrase ‘probably armed, possibly not’. The 'possibility' is what haunts him, along with the desensitising brutality that he has experienced. 

The use of the word 'tackle', and its connotations of sport, also minimises the action that the soldier was asked to take. Was he instructed to shoot the looter, and 'tackle' is a euphemism that he uses, or was he directly told to 'tackle' him, the decision about what this entailed being left up to him, and the euphemism is in the orders? The poem doesn't make it clear which interpretation is the case, but the casual lexis is in stark contrast to the events that it describes. In this way, it is reminiscent of the lexis used in earlier war poetry to make war seem more acceptable.  Sir Henry Newbolt's Vitae Lampada, for instance, creates a link between schoolboy sport and the courage needed to fight in war, and Jessie Pope picked this up to use in propaganda poetry such as 'Who's for the Game?'--poetry that poets such as Wilfred Owen bitterly objected to ('Dulce et Decorum Est' is probably Owen's most famous counter blast to Pope, but 'Disabled' also poignantly describes how the speaker thought war would be like a football match).

The use of the present tense throughout the poem is striking, creating a sense of continuous action and drawing the auditor--and the reader--into the action that is described. This use of the present tense to describe past actions is known as the historic present and is a strategy which makes past events vivid and immediate. In this case it also makes it clear that the soldier is constantly re-living the events that he describes, which are continually present to him in the dreams and hallucinations that he describes as the poem goes on.  The initial description of the looter's death seems clear and detached, as though language is a barrier that the speaker is using to defend himself against stronger feeling.

 The poem is written in irregular quatrains, loosely tied together with half-rhyme, and concluding with a couplet. The rhymes are not strong in the first stanzas, for instance ‘fire/swear’, ‘side/times’, but get stronger as the poem moves towards the conclusion of the initial account, with what is almost a clear AABB quatrain in stanza 4: ‘agony/goes by’, ‘body/lorry’. This pattern is then repeated, with the following two stanzas again having loose rhymes (‘rounds/out’) and then the seventh stanza again offering clear AABB rhymes: ‘eyes/lines’, ‘land/sand’. The final couplet is unrhymed. In some ways there may be a suggestion that the rhymes indicate the intensity of experience—certainly the way in which they seem to creep up on the reader, with the apparently casual quatrains firming up in these terms, creates a striking poetic effect.

The poem seems to seek to imitate the speaking voice, and the language used is strikingly colloquial, using words and phrases which are associated with the ordinary speaking voice, with a sprinkling of slang: ‘legs it’, ‘mate’, ‘letting fly’, ‘carted off’. Armitage here seems to be trying to imitate the soldier’s idiolect so as to make the effect of reportage more convincing. As such, he's following in the tradition of soldier-poets like Wilfred Owen, who sometimes shocked contemporary audiences with his use of the colloquial in his poems. In 'Remains' the language is initially simple and direct—even brutal: ‘he’s there on the ground, sort of inside out’. As the poem progresses, the language seems to become more sophisticated, with poetic effects such as alliteration becoming more frequent and elaborate: ‘sun stunned sand smothered land’. The use of wordplay, as in ‘near to the knuckle’ partakes of both these linguistic modes—both colloquial and poetic.

The image of the three soldiers all shooting at the running man is a brutal one (especially as it seems as though he is running away as he 'legs it up the road'. The use of 'legs it' again grounds the experience in the soldier's lived everyday life--it is the phrase you would use about someone running away following a minor incident of vandalism perhaps, and not something you associate with war.  At this point we are introduced to the soldier's companions--not named, but anonymised as 'somebody else and somebody else'. They join with him in shooting the man, and this seems to justify his decision as they 'are all of the same mind... Three of a kind', the internal rhyme mind/kind reinforcing this connection.  Again the words used to describe the shooting seem to minimise it: 'letting fly' is a phrase that is more commonly used about someone losing their temper verbally, though it can be associated with physical violence (this verbal connection is subtly reinforced by 'I swear' placed at the end of the line). The phrase is not usually associated with gunfire, and this contrast between language and meaning emphasises the contrast between the soldier's experience and his ability to rationalise it.

Tanaphora at the start of stanza three reinforces the violence of the assault. The three soldiers have clearly massively over-used necessary force in this instance, the violence of 'rips through his life' suggesting the unstoppable force of the bullets from a machine-gun. The hyperbolic image of 'broad daylight on the other side' is almost comic-strip vivid, suggesting a huge hole in the man's torso as he is hit 'a dozen times' by the three soldiers, literally turned inside out by the assault. The shift of the enjambement from the colloquial 'sort of inside out' to the lyrical 'pain itself, the image of agony' gives an aching seriousness to the death, which is then deflated by the bathetic 'one of my mates...tosses his guts back into his body / then he's carted off'. There's a half-reminder here that 'tosses his guts' is actually slang for 'vomits'. The soldiers are not sick at the sight of what they have done, but it's hinted that they might be. The necessity for actually picking up the 'guts' of the dying man is couched in terms that depersonalise him as a problem to be tidied up.

he use of

The key line halfway through the poem: ‘End of story, except not really’ has a strong caesura which indicates how this incident will haunt the soldier on his return to civilian life. The possibility that the looter was not armed haunts him, especially as he has to travel past the spot for the rest of his time in Basra. The use of the term ‘blood shadow’ for the stain that has been left on the street comes to represent a real shadow on his mind, reminiscent of the ineradicable ‘bloody spot’ in Macbeth. Another reminder of Macbeth is the focus on sleep and sleeplessness. In Macbeth, the eponymous hero is haunted by the murders that he has done to get the crown. When he first does the murder, he fixates on his hands, covered in blood. He cannot sleep subsequently, and he and his wife are both haunted with what we would now call post-traumatic stress, endlessly re-living the murder and focusing on its bloodier aspects: . 

The soldier here seems to go through a similar process. Just as Macbeth is unable to sleep after the murder, believing 'Macbeth has murdered sleep', so the soldier  experiences flashbacks when he shuts his eyes: 'blink /and he bursts again through the doors of the bank'. Macbeth explains to his wife how he experiences: 'the affliction of these terrible dreams / That shake us nightly: better be with the dead, / Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace, / Than on the torture of the mind to lie / In restless ecstasy'. In a similar way, the soldier explains how his sleep is disturbed with a vivid juxtaposition of the words 'sleep' and 'dream' with repetitive reminders of the action from earlier in the poem: 'Sleep, and he's probably armed, possibly not, / Dream, and he's torn apart by a dozen rounds'. Like Macbeth and his wife, the soldier can find no respite, 'he's here in my head when I close my eyes'  despite attempts to block his experience with alcohol and pills: ‘the drink and the drugs won’t flush him out’.

Just as Macbeth imagines King Duncan coming out of his grave to haunt him, the speaker of this poem feels that the dead looter is 'here', and 'not left for dead...six feet under in desert sand'. The reality of the haunting is brought home by the final image of 'his bloody life in my bloody hands', the imagery again recalling the strongest and most persistent image in Macbeth, which haunts both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Macbeth as he feels that nothing, not even the 'multitudinous seas' (Act 2 scene 2) can wash the blood from his hands, Lady Macbeth as she sleepwalks, endlessly washing her hands and unable to cleanse them from the blood of the murder as 'who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' (Act 5, scene 1) 

The final irony in the poem comes from the use of colloquialism again: 'bloody' is an expletive as well as a literal description. The speaker's 'bloody hands' are hands covered with blood and also hands with which he is annoyed, just as 'his bloody life' is an exclamation of helpless frustration at the responsibility of war. The looter's life has been in the soldier's hands, and now because of his decision, it will remain, like Macbeth's guilt, staining his 'bloody hands' beyond the time of war.

AQA Power and Conflict: Bayonet Charge

'Bayonet Charge' comes from Hughes's first collection Hawk in the Rain. It describes a bayonet charge in what is probably the First World War (though there is little identifying detail, the use of 'King' suggests this).  Ted Hughes once said in an interview 'when I first started writing I wrote again and again and again about the First World War', an engagement shaped partly by his admiration for poets like Wilfred Owen, partly by his father's experiences in the war at Gallipoli, and partly, according to his own report, by the West Yorkshire countryside of his childhood, which he reported as 'in mourning for the First World War'. You can read a fuller account of Hughes's engagement with the war in Tim Kendall's Fighting Back Over the Same Ground: Ted Hughes and War, but for the moment it is enough to know just that at the start of his writing career, he experimented a lot with this kind of pseudo war poetry, living himself into the role of a WW1 soldier. I call it pseudo war poetry because although it imitates quite well the poetry of masters like Owen and Sassoon, it does not have that edge that the poetry borne out of real experience seems to have--something that Hughes himself later came to admit.

The poem is in three stanzas, the first and last of eight lines, and the second of seven. This unevenness is emphasised by the enjambement between stanzas, which the punctuation (particularly the parenthetical dashes of lines 8 and 9) emphasises. The lines vary in length but are about ten syllables long, with little regularity of metre or length, something that adds to the colloquial feel of the speaking voice, the poet seeming to recount a dream or a nightmare-like experience, as though caught in mid-account. Although the poem is in the third person, it has the effect of free undirected speech in that there is no 'he said' or 'he thought' indication. Rather, we are plunged straight into the experience of the soldier.

The poem starts with the adverb 'suddenly'--an unusual start to a sentence--and in the same way, this gives us the impression that we are plunged into the middle of the action that it describes. The poem is full of participles: 'running.. stumbling... hearing... smacking... sweating' that give it a sense of pace and purpose. we are dragged out of the past tense 'awoke.. was running' into what seems like the present action 'stumbling', enacting the confusion of the central character in the poem (in fact, the auxiliary verb 'was' governs all the following participles, so that the poem makes perfect grammatical sense--it is an interesting effect).

The 'raw' experience of the protagonist and the 'raw-seamed hot khaki' link together the new recruit and his uncomfortable clothes and the sharpness of his awakening until we are uncertain as to whether this is a real experience or not. The enjambement between line 1 and 2 emphasises the word 'raw' and brings to it the added sense of hurt or vulnerability. He seem literally weighed down by sweat, the wordplay here on 'heavy' suggesting that his fear and effort is a physical weight upon him. The object of the charge is paradoxically pictured as beautiful--'a green hedge / that dazzled'  suggests that he is attracted to it, the following 'with rifle fire' almost creating a sense of bathos as we--with him--realise the danger it represents.

The semantic field of the body resonates throughout the poem, but it is represented by inanimate things that are personified--the 'bullets smacking the belly out of the air', the rifle 'numb as a smashed arm', these imagined injuries making the man in the midst of it seem almost invulnerable by comparison, though the wounds suggested do present a dark threat of what may be in store for him. The 'patriotic tear' of line 7 might remind us of the patriotism in 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', the sentimentality of those not directly affected by war. Now, it is transformed into an industrial weight of 'molten iron', the machine-like image reinforcing the unnaturalness of the experience of the charge, and the effort it represents. The 'catch in the throat' of tears here becomes the real pain of breathing heavily when running, the pain 'like molten iron' as Hughes uses hyperbole to get his point across.

In stanza two, the transformation of patriotism to pain seems to impel the hesitation of the man 'in bewilderment then'. The forces propelling him--presumably states, government--are seen as 'cold clockwork'; both fate and powers simply beyond his control. He is seen as the moving hand that the clockwork causes to act 'pointing that second', but the self-questioning causes him (unlike the soldiers Tennyson describes) to pause. He seems to see himself at this moment, running like someone who has been awakened out of fear, 'jumped up in the dark' (here surely a symbolic dark--he has run into the battle without questioning what he is fighting for) and is 'listening between his footfalls for the reason'. The image suggests someone who is being chased, and of course he is not being chased, but has simply started to charge, he is the one running towards the guns--and this makes him pause. again he seems like something inanimate, a statue, frozen in movement while he thinks about what he is doing. The strong caesura in the middle of line 15 emphasises this pause, as does the shorter stanza.

The poem sets off again with the strongly sibilant line 'then the shot-slashed furrows/ threw up a yellow hare'. The hare--traditionally a swift-moving animal who could easily outrun a man--is here passive, 'thrown up' by the earth, and instead of running, it 'rolled like a flame / And crawled in a threshing circle'. Against the 'clods' of the field across which the soldier runs, it seems brightly coloured (like the green hedge--or like the flame it resembles in movement?) and yellow (Hares are usually a light brown colour--but this hare may be more the colour of a golden Labrador) It seems to be clearly injured, the word 'threshing' particularly suggesting its pain, but it is silent, and the horrible silent scream suggested by 'its mouth wide/ Open silent' seems to foretell the soldier's fate if he stays still. Hares often rely on their colour to camouflage them against predators, and will therefore lie still in fields unless disturbed,when they run in their characteristically zig-zag fashion to elude pursuit (like a soldier trying to dodge bullets, one might think). Have a look at this clip of hares being hunted by golden eagles (don't worry, the hares escape) to get an idea of how fast they can go. For Hughes (and more importantly, for the soldier he is writing about ) a running hare like this would have been a familiar sight--the hare wounded and thrashing about on the ground, would have been a very vivid reminder of what injury you could get by staying still.

In the final stanza, the soldier moves again: 'plunged past' the hare. The very powerful word 'plunged' here reminds us perhaps of the gassed soldier in 'Dulce and Decorum Est'-- 'he plunges at me', but also--as does this whole poem--reminds me of Owen's poem 'Spring Offensive'. This poem has also the grass and the attractiveness of the green along which men race 'exposed'--and also describes how they 'plunged' toward death and how they 'crawled' back--well worth a read to really see where Hughes was coming from.

Hughes here describes how the soldier drops everything--like someone running for their life would drop 'luxuries', he here drops 'King, honour, human dignity'--in other words, drops that 'brimming tear' of patriotism. Abstractions here seem like real possessions, abandoned in the face of reality. Here, finally, only 'alarm' fuels his run, like the hare running from hounds. The final image of the poem suggesting how the air becomes electric, his terror like a bomb about to explode, the vivid 'blue' like the earlier 'yellow' and 'green' seeming to sharpen the image.

The poem actually ends with this panic, the 'terror's touchy dynamite' crackling and about to go off--like the start of the poem, it seems abrupt, as though we have seen just a section of an experience, perhaps only partly understood. For an interesting reading of the poem, look at Tim Kendall's War poetry blog--this article will hopefully have given you the information you need to answer some of the questions that he raises.  Despite his unkind words about the anthology, or perhaps because of them, he makes some good points about this poem.