The poem "Mametz Wood" by Owen Sheers describes the Battle of Mametz Wood during World War 1. It is written in 7 stanzas that rotate focus between the landscape, human remains, and soldiers. Sound devices like assonance and alliteration are used instead of rhyme. The poem was inspired by the author visiting the battlefield years later and seeing remnants of the battle still emerging from the ground, as well as a photo of a mass grave with skeletons linked arm-in-arm. It reflects on the violence of the past juxtaposed with the present peaceful woodland setting.

1. Mametz Wood

3. Form and Structure
• Mametz Wood is written in seven three-line stanzas. The
length of the lines changes and so the shape of the poem
might, if you were a simpleton, suggest the uneven ground
over which the battle of Mametz Wood was fought.
• The stanzas enjamb sometimes, showing the reflective nature
of the poem perhaps. The first stanza has a full stop. Then a
pair of stanzas are a single sentence. This single/pair pattern
is followed to the end of the poem.
• The focus of each stanza rotates:
land/remains/soldiers/land/remains/soldiers. The final stanza
compacts all three topics into the final image of 'unearthed'
skulls singing.

4. Language: Sound
• Sounds are important but the poem doesn’t use a rhyme
scheme. Instead, assonance and alliteration are used
throughout (just as in Wilfred Owen…). Running through the
poem in rough order:
– Sometimes there are soft sounds: "farmers found" and “unearthing”,
both of which refer to the remains that are discovered.
– There are harder alliterative sounds - "blade", "blown", "broken bird's
egg", "breaking blue”, "chit", "china" – that may be intended to be
onomatopoeic.
– Across stanzas three and four assonance slows the poem down and
possibly represents hurt or tension: "walk… towards the wood”,
a "wound working". We hear slow long vowels again in
"arm", "dance" and "macabre" in the last stanza. The poem ends with a
partial rhyme, the only time this technique is even
attempted: "sung/tongues".

5. Language: imagery
• There is plenty of visual imagery. The
poem mixes military and natural imagery
(‘chit’, ‘sentinel’, ‘birds egg’ of the skull
which connects to ‘nest’ (but here,
machine guns).
• There is a sense of extended metaphor –
the bone fragments of the second stanza
later become a ‘mosaic’.

6. Context: Owen Sheers (1974–)
• Owen Sheers was born in Fiji in 1974 but was brought up in south Wales.
He now divides his time between Wales and New York. As well as poetry,
he has written an award-winning non-fiction book, Dust Diaries, essays,
novels and plays and has worked as a television presenter.
• ‘Mametz Wood’ was featured as the Saturday poem in The Guardian in
2005 and is included in Sheers’ second collection of poetry, Skirrid Hill.
Skirrid derives from a word meaning divorce or separation and many of the
poems in the collection are concerned with loss. The volume has been
described as ‘elegaic’, a word that certainly applies to ‘Mametz Wood’.
• The poem ‘Mametz Wood’ was inspired by a trip to the Somme. Sheers
was involved in a documentary film project about two Welsh writers, David
Jones and Wyn Griffiths. They served with the 38th Welsh Division and both
fought at Mametz Wood (described by Jones in In Parenthesis).
• While Sheers was in France, a previously unknown grave was uncovered. It
contained the bodies of 20 Allied soldiers, hastily buried but with arms
interlinked as described in the poem. Sheers has said that when he saw the
photograph of the grave, he knew it was an image that would stay with him
and that it was a subject he would want to write about. This poem is the
result, surfacing some time later, just as, he says, ‘elements of the battle are
still surfacing… years later.’

7. Historical References
The battle of Mametz Wood was a real event that took place in July
1916, part of the First Battle of the Somme. The 38th Welsh Division
was trying to take a heavily fortified wooded area on high ground.
German forces were well equipped with machine guns and the
attacking soldiers had to approach across exposed, upwardly sloping
land. The 38th Welsh suffered heavy losses (almost 4000), including
some to what is now called ‘friendly fire’.
Dance macabre or ‘Dance of Death’ was a theme of much medieval
poetry and art. It depicts a skeleton (Death) leading all ranks of people
(from the highest to the lowest) to their graves. It symbolises the
inevitability of death for all, and the futility of earthly rank and material
possessions. Its appearance in religious imagery was meant to urge
viewers to reflect on the state of their souls.

8. I wrote ‘Mametz Wood’ after visiting the site of a WWI battlefield on the Somme
in Northern France.
I’d gone to Mametz on the 85th anniversary of the battle that had happened
there in 1916 to make a short film about two Welsh writers who’d written about
their experiences of fighting at Mametz.
The writers were David Jones and Llewelyn Wyn Griffith, and although they
both survived the battle of Mametz Wood, around 4,000 men of the 38th Welsh
Division did not. The attacking Welsh soldiers had to advance uphill, over open
ground, into sweeping ‘hip and thigh’ machine gun fire. On more than one
occasion they advanced into their own creeping artillery barrage. The fighting
was brutal and, once in the wood, often at close quarters.
Walking over that same ground, now a ploughed field, 85 years later I was
struck by how remnants of the battle – strips of barbed wire, shells, fragments
of bone, were still rising to the surface. It was as if the earth under my feet that
was now being peacefully tilled for food could not help but remember its violent
past and the lives that had sunk away into it. Entering the wood, a ‘memory’ of
the battle was still evident there too. Although there was a thick undergrowth of
trailing ivy and brambles, it undulated through deep shell holes. My knowledge
of what had caused those holes in the ground and of what had happened
among those trees stood in strange juxtaposition to the Summer calmness of
the wood itself; the dappled sunlight, the scent of wild garlic, the birdsong
filtering down from the higher branches.

9. While I was in France visiting Mametz Wood I read a newspaper article about a
shallow war grave that had been uncovered during the building of a car factory
nearby. The newspaper carried a photograph of this grave which I will never
forget. There were twenty skeletons lying in it in various states of
completeness, some still wearing rotten boots, others without. Each skeleton
lay in its own position of death, but all of them were linked, arm in arm. It was a
strange, touching, disturbing photograph and as soon as I saw it I knew I
wanted to write a poem about Mametz; about how the resonance of that battle
was still being remembered in the soil over which it was fought.
The poem I’d eventually write, much like the remnants of the fighting at
Mametz, took a long time to surface into the form it now takes in the book
'Skirrid Hill'.
I’m not sure how much more I will say about the poem itself as I believe a
poem’s meaning should be found in the reading of it, not in an explanation of
how it was written. What I will say is that my choices of image, vocabulary,
focus were all guided by those few moments of standing in that Summer wood,
experiencing the strange juxtaposition of its natural present against its all too
unnatural past. And, of course, by the photograph of that grave and the desire it
left me with to give voice to those silent, unknown skeletons, most of whom
would have been younger than I was then, 26 years old, when they were killed.