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BBC - GCSE Bitesize: Attitudes, themes and ideas

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A secondary school revision resource for GCSE English Literature about Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem, "Sonnet 43".

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Sound

It appears to be written in very plain, almost prosaic (everyday) language. There is a very subtle use of sound, throughout, however. This expresses the overall theme (the poem is a kind of hymn to the dead). It also builds towards the final image: the unearthed bones appear to be singing.

There is no rhyme scheme, but assonance and alliteration mean the stanzas are linked by sounds. The first stanza, for example, starts with the soft sound of "farmers found". We then hear the harder 'b' of "blades" and "back" which is picked up in the second stanza with "blade", "blown" and "broken bird's egg". The next stanza also has "breaking blue". Along with the chipped sound of bone in "chit" and "china" this form of alliteration perhaps echoes of the sound of gunfire and battlefield destruction.

Across stanzas three and four there is the wary 'w' sound of "white", "were", "walk... towards the wood" and a "wound working" of the stanza that follows it. This stanza in turn introduces the sibilant "stands sentinel" and "surface of the skin".

Lines 14/15 uses assonance to play of the long 'a' sound in "arm", "dance" and "macabre", a sound echoed in "outlasted" in stanza six which also has the most striking "sound effect" of the poem. In "socketed heads titled back" a series of sharp rapid sounds evoke the moment the men were strafed with machine-gun fire and died.

The visual image of the soldiers' heads being thrown back by the impact of bullets is suddenly switched in the final stanza, however: their heads are back and jaws open because they are singing. The sounds of the final stanza contain a series of clear vowel changes: 'i', 'u', 'o', 'er', and 'a'. It is as if the men were doing the traditional voice exercise of 'do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do...'. This stanza also contains the only clear rhyme in the poem: "sung/tongues".

Imagery

This concluding stanza also pulls together the disparate images of the poem: the earth, the bones and the people those bones came from. Right from the start, however, Sheers mixes his imagery to show how there is no simple division between mankind on one side and 'mother nature' on the other.

It is the farmers who "tended the land". It is the land that needs healing (an example of pathetic fallacy). The references to "bird's egg" and "nesting" are used to describe a broken skull (in line 6) and hidden machine guns (in line 9). The bones themselves are described in terms of "china plate" and a "mosaic" while their position in the ground recalls a strangely comic form of dance routine.

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It appears to be written in very plain, almost prosaic (everyday) language. There is a very subtle use of sound, throughout, however. This expresses the overall theme (the poem is a kind of hymn to the dead). It also builds towards the final image: the unearthed bones appear to be singing.

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Owen Sheers on the writing of Mametz Wood

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Owen Sheers on the writing of Mametz Wood

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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.

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The Soldier