Hello everybody and welcome to this video where I'm going to analyse the poem ‘Bayonet Charge’ by Ted Hughes. As always, we're going to begin by looking at the poet themselves. And, as you know by now, when it comes to biographical details about a poet, we only need to focus on what is important in helping us to 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 we do need to think about about his life are the fact that he was born in 1930 and died in 1998. That might come as a bit of a surprise considering the poem ‘Bayonet Charge’ is essentially a World War I war poem. He grew up in the countryside of Yorkshire from a very early age and throughout his adult life was passionate about animals and nature and would go on to become very famous – probably the most famous poet when it came to writing poetry about animals. He was devoted to poetry from a 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 so that meant that he was going to struggle financially for much of his life, always looking for ways to make a little bit of 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 the Iron Man which went on to be made into the Iron Giant film. His father served in World War I. We'll talk about that a bit more in a minute. Ted Hughes was obsessed with astrology – very passionate – studied it very deeply, and believed in its effects and was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 until his death in 1998. And if you're studying this on AQA board, you'll see that they seem to choose quite a lot of the poets who have been the Poet Laureate as well. So it's interesting to think about the context of this poem. As I've just said, one thing which might be immediately surprising is the period in which Hughes was alive. ‘Bayonet Charge’ is a poem about World War I, and it compares nicely to other World War I poetry or perhaps the much older ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’. But Hughes himself was not even born when the First World War took place, unlike Wilfred Owen who we see in the middle here. 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's a fact which proves key to helping us understand ‘Bayonet Charge’. So what was Hughes’ motivation for writing a World War I war poem? Well, there are three important factors to consider. Perhaps most important is the fact that Hughes’ father had served in the war. This is Ted and his dad here. In fact, William Hughes was one of only seventeen soldiers in the Lancashire Fusiliers who survived death at Gallipoli. And through other Hughes poems, we're presented a picture of his father as somebody who really spent the rest of his life emotionally paralyzed, battered, and traumatized from what he had experienced in World War I. So, we could say that Hughes writes about World War I because, although he didn't personally experience it firsthand, he felt the effects of it in his everyday life through his relationship with his father. There's an interesting bit in his biography where we read that one of Hughes’ friends from his early adult life remembers him wearing a World War I issue greatcoat. He certainly was obsessed with World War I in the early part of his adult life. Secondly, Hughes grew up in West Yorkshire, and he said himself that he was “still stunned by the First World War”. You see, the region lost so many of its population to the war that Hughes felt “the whole region was in mourning for the First World War”. And finally Hughes wrote about World War I poetry due to 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 which so greatly influenced Hughes’ own existence. In his published letters, Hughes explained that, “Owen, when I came to know his poems, grew to represent my father's experience”. We'll be talking more about Wilfred Owen later. Now, ‘Bayonet Charge’ is one of six poems included in Hughes's first published collection, ‘The Hawk in the Rain’. Sylvia Plath, Hughes’ wife, typed the poems up and entered them into a competition, and Hughes actually won the competition which resulted in the book being published both in the UK and the U.S. Let's look at the poem itself. Now, I have to say that this is an incredibly complex poem to understand. Many of Ted Hughes’ poems are equally difficult, but this one is so complex and its complexity is fundamental to its major theme. And I'll talk to you about some of the deliberate complexity throughout this analysis but, first, let me just give you an overview of what happens in this poem. You can see onscreen that it’s broken into three verses. In the first verse, a soldier wakes up and finds himself charging towards the enemy with his gun and bayonet in hand. In the second verse, he suddenly stops to contemplate what he's doing and why he's doing it. And in the third and final verse, the focus shifts to a hare which has found itself caught up in the midst of the battle. It's important to talk about the theme. Lots of poems that you'll be studying alongside this one are to do with war and conflict, but that's too vague, too generalized as a theme. Now, we need to look at making it just a little bit more specific. So I looked a lot at this poem, and I came up with what I feel is the unique angle. I think this poem really focuses on the indescribable horror of war. Ted Hughes is passionate about making it very clear that our ideas about what war is like are nothing like the reality and that, actually, war is so terrible you cannot really adequately, accurately describe it in poetry or in any form of communication. And if we take that idea, that it's not just about “Oh yes, war is bad” and “Isn’t the soldier brave?” but it's about how the horror of war is indescribable, then that helps us with our analysis of the poem. As with all poetry analysis, it's important to analyze language, structure, form to fully understand the poem. And we'll begin by looking at some of the overarching points regarding structure which we see throughout the poem. When we look at the first word in the poem – and this is a very simple point but it is a valid point – the poem begins in the middle of the action with the word ‘suddenly’. Now, clearly something has gone before this moment, but we as the reader are not made 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 is feeling when he suddenly wakes up and is charging forward with his bayonet. Ted Hughes uses a lot of clever devices to make us feel in some way like the soldier himself is feeling by throwing us in middle, shocking us right into the action, and us being unaware of the surrounding context that helps us to relate to the soldier. When we read the poem aloud, two things are very obvious. Firstly, there's the enjambment found throughout the piece. Now enjambment is the structural device of having sentences straddle numerous lines. In other words, the sentences don't end at the end of the line. They go on 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 in a threshing circle,’ But you can see that not only does this sentence continue on to the next line, but there's a whole new verse as well. And that is the structural device of enjambment. Now, whenever a poet employs enjambment, it instantly creates a disjointed, unordered effect on the reader. And just like the soldier is thrown into a chaotic and disordered event waking into a battle charge, the enjambment reflects this. Just like the soldier, again, the reader struggles to make sense of the chaos and disorder of the structure of the poem. Similarly, Hughes employs caesura. Now, caesura is where sentences end in the middle of a line with either a full stop or a question mark. And we see an example here – Was he the hand pointing 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 quite interesting because both of them take place in the second verse. And that second verse, of course, is all 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 to think. Now, the caesura combines with enjambment to create this combined effect of this chaotic and hard-to-follow structure. It's interesting as well to think about repetition. So Ted Hughes was a masterful poet. Amazing. One of the most talented poets ever. And it's interesting to note the repetition in lines 1 & 2 of the word ‘raw’. So, within the first two lines of the poem we have a word that is repeated. Suddenly, he awoke and was running – raw In raw-seamed hot khaki Now the idea of ‘raw in raw-seamed hot khaki’ is clumsy in terms of expression. If a student gave me that as a piece of writing, I would probably hand it back saying, “Look. Replace one of the words that you've repeated.” But, clearly, it was a deliberate choice by Hughes, and there are two possible interpretations for what all of this is about. When a poet repeats themselves-- it's different if it's a refrain and a sort of chorus. But whenever a poet seems to be in a very stressful moment in a poem and they repeat a certain word, it can be used to show their 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 choosing to repeat themselves at a time of great stress. And this simple analysis is that the repetition reflects the shock the soldier has, experiencing waking up into this sort of charge. It's as if he's stuttering, struggling to articulate the moment, and our poet’s repetition reflects that. And this interpretation would fit in with the theme. War is so horrific the soldier is unable to clearly express the moment. He's forced instead to stutter and repeat himself. However, there is a much more sophisticated interpretation to be had. And this is something that I spent hours researching, reading, and communicating with somebody about, the wonderful Tim Kendall of Exeter University who wrote this book ‘Poetry of the First World War’. Or edited it, I should say. Oxford University Press 2006. I've communicated back and forth with Tim Kendall. And his ideas are fantastic so I want to share them with you here. As I already mentioned, Hughes was a massive fan of Wilfred Owen, the World War I poet. Now, Wilfred Owen wrote just one poem about a bayonet charge, and that was a poem entitled ‘Spring Offensive’. And we can look at the poem – and you can google it as well – and we can see that there are a lot of similarities between this poem and Hughes' ‘Bayonet Charge’. Not only is, obviously, the topic of the ‘Bayonet Charge’ exactly the same for, have a look at the first two lines. We see something very interesting in the first two lines where it says – Halted against the shade of a last hill, They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease As you can see, in the first two lines we have repeated words. And Owen’s ‘lying easy, were at ease’ is very similar to Hughes’ ‘raw in raw-seamed hot khaki’. It seems that this is an allusion to the Wilfred Owen poem, and it's not just one example. This is a good piece of theory for those of you who are analyzing texts. If you've just got one example of something, then that's not enough. But, actually, there are lots of similarities between the two poems. So if we look at ‘Spring Offensive’, we have lots of words to do with temperature. In ‘Spring Offensive’ if we have ‘warm’; we have ‘sun’, ‘hot’, ‘burned’, ‘flames’, and ‘cool’. In ‘Bayonet Charge’ we find similar words to do with temperature – ‘molten’, ‘cold’, and ‘flame’. In the poem ‘Spring Offensive’ we have the phrase ‘and crawling’. In ‘Bayonet Charge’ by Hughes we have ‘and crawled’. And in ‘Spring Offensive’ we have ‘plunged and fell away past’, whereas in ‘Bayonet Charge’ we have ‘plunged past’. So, it's clear that there are deliberate similarities. Now, there are numerous reasons that we could pin this down to. This is the early writing of Ted Hughes. Is it that he wrote this as a sort of poetry exercise, copying the original style of ‘Spring Offensive’? He obviously didn't know these poems were going to be published. He says in his book of letters that, when he realized he'd won the competition and the poems were going to be published, he was embarrassed. He realized he would like to go back over them. He often talks about the fact that he was heavily influenced by certain poets and mirrored their style. But it's interesting to think about the theme of the poem again. So, let's have a think about this and try and to work out how this all links to our theme – the inexplicable horror of war. Now, Tim Kendall put it brilliantly. He said, “Hughes has to sound like Owen because everything he knows about a bayonet charge comes out of Owen. It's a secondhand poem about a secondhand experience.” And that explains it brilliantly, doesn't it? If this poem is about the inexplicable horror of war, then, of course, Ted Hughes isn't going to be able to explain the horror of that war. To explain and express the true horror of the moment, he is forced to take from someone who was there – Wilfred Owen. That fits our theme nicely. War is so inexplicably horrific that even the gifted Ted Hughes has to revert back to the work of others to express it. Now you might not make that reference to the allusion to the Wilfred Owen 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, clever images. And then to have what seems to be such a weak piece of repetition at the beginning, we had to delve into why that is. So, whether you write about it in your exam or not, I think it's really useful to help us understand the poem. So, the structural choices already detailed along with the language choices made by the poet make this a very hard poem to get through. Like most people, if you read through the poem, there will be little bit you think, “Okay. I get that.” But a lot of people would think, “What on earth is this about? What is happening? I sort of understand the basics – that it's about war – but I don't know how I could write about it in an exam.” And that is a deliberate choice by Ted Hughes. He makes the poem very difficult to get through. So, the difficulty in getting to the end of the poem can be seen to reflect the difficulty the soldier faces in getting to the point he wishes to reach whilst running. Just as he struggles laboriously through the mud, we the reader trudge heavily through the structural and linguistic sludge of the poem. Hughes deliberately makes the poem hard to read and even harder to understand, once again, helping us to empathize with the situation that the soldier is in. Now, so far we can see how Hughes has used enjambment, caesura, repetition and the allusion to Wilfred Owen's poem to present the sheer horror of war. Now let's begin to take apart some of the complex images we find in the poem. My plan for these videos is always to tell you something that is different to what you're learning in school. So I'm not going to go through every single image and explain it to you because I'm sure that's what a lot of classwork is based on. But I'm going to tell you some of the things that I think are really significant. Let's begin with these similes in the poem. I've highlighted them on the screen here, and it doesn't take a genius to work out. There are six similes within this poem which is virtually one every sentence. Now, each simile can be analyzed individually but let's first stop and think about the combined effect of a poem that is ridden with similes. What is a simile? It is the comparison of one thing to another. It can be seen as a poet or writer saying, “Look, I cannot explain this but I can liken it to something else.” In other words, “I don't know how to actually describe this moment. The best I can do is to compare it to something that I can describe”. So if a simile is used to make something understandable, then it stands to reason that the thing being described in itself is impossible to describe. So if I saw a monster or an alien, what did it look like? I would probably revert to using similes – “Well, it had, you know, hair that was streaming 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 knowing about the amount of similes in this poem, the overwhelming use of similes can be added to the list of devices that Hughes is using to express the sheer horror of war. War is so terrible he cannot describe it. He has to revert back to using similes to say what it is like because he cannot say what it is because it is so awful. I think it's really, really clever. Following his death in 1998, in his obituary, the interesting thing that was in it-- It was all interesting but one part of it read that Hughes used ‘brutal masculine fistfuls of words’. And this is clearly evident in ‘Bayonet Charge’ which is filled to the brim with complex and often confusing imagery. In some ways we don't need to analyze each and every individual image. Sometimes we need to pick an image or line apart simply to understand what's going on in the poem. And other times we sense that the quotations have connotations beyond the literal meaning and are worth analyzing. Let's have a look at a few examples – ‘Bullets smacking the belly out of the air.’ Now it's interesting to think about the fact that, actually, the soldier is the only person in this poem. There are no enemy soldiers mentioned. There are no dead bodies which seems ambiguous. If this is his battlefield, you would think he's very observant of everything around him. But we don't see any dead bodies. Now some people have said, “Well, maybe this is all a dream.” And that certainly could help to explain the mysterious yellow hare at the final verse. But the fact that there are no enemy soldiers helps us to focus on what there is, which is nature. In this line, where we have the bullets smacking the belly out of the air, we actually have an interesting personification of the air which has its belly now, has the air knocked out of it. And I think that's quite interesting to think about the effect war has on nature. If we say that the air symbolizes nature, it's just as much a victim of the war as the soldier. And this consideration of nature certainly links to the biographical background of Hughes and his love of nature. And, of course, he was a devout lover of all things outdoors. The focus on nature helps us too to understand the ‘hare’ reference in the final verse. So, in the final verse we see this mention of a yellow hare, and this is very mysterious. There is no such thing as a yellow hare. So what is it all about? Again, we could think, “Well, is he dreaming?” It's possible to think that the ‘yellow’ has a link to cowardice. The word ‘yellow’ does prepare the reader for the upcoming word ‘yelling’, but there's no clear answer. What is clear is that the hare is another reference to nature, and the hare is a victim of this war moment. So, not only did Hughes love animals, he would go on later in his career to become arguably the best animal poet of all time. And here the ‘hare’, just like the previous ‘air’, reminds the reader of the impact war has on nature. Whilst nature is impacted by war, it has no interest in war itself which is evidenced in the line in verse two – ‘in what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations’. Knowing Hughes’ passion for astrology, the poet is probably considering, by stars, what this moment 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 neither is interested in the war as we have ‘cold clockwork’ which suggests the soldier’s simply a cog in a machine. Nobody cares about what happens to him. So what does this poem actually say about the causes of war? You remember in Tennyson's ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ we read of the bravery of the doomed soldiers. ‘Bayonet Charge’ offers a strong comparison. Whereas the Light Brigade were not there to wonder why, the soldier in ‘Bayonet Charge’ literally stops in verse two and begins to question what he's doing and why he's doing it. Attitudes to war are therefore great to compare between both poems. In verse one we read – ‘The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye Sweating like molten iron from the center of his chest’ This confusing simile is used to express the way in which the original patriotism of the soldier has now been pushed aside for sheer panic. Consider the vast array of negative language that's used in verse one – ‘hot’, ‘raw’, ‘stumbling’, ‘lugged’, ‘numbed’, ‘smashed’. This is that brutal fistful of words which Hughes was noted for. And the overload of emotive vocabulary is employed to overwhelm the reader, reflecting how the soldier himself is feeling. Perhaps the most complicated image in the poem can be found in that simile – ‘He was running Like a man who has jumped up in the dark and runs Listening between his footfalls for the reason Of his still running,’ Now what does this mean? Well, basically, it means that he was running like a man would run if he faced the situation that the soldier himself is facing. In other words, it's a pointless line. It’s the same as saying he was eating a sandwich like someone who would eat a sandwich. So why does Hughes make this line so complex? Well, he wants the reader to struggle through the poem, to be bogged down, weighed down by its complexity and confusion. And when we feel that, we feel what the soldier feels. So Hughes is using complex language to enable the reader to relate to, in some way, the experience the soldier has. Very, very clever. In the final verse we find a fascinating line where the soldier plunges past with thoughts of ‘King, honour, human dignity, etcetera’. I love this word ‘etcetera’. This is probably my favorite line in the whole poem. This final word ‘etcetera’ is used to mean ‘and so on’. The tone is mocking. It criticizes the patriotic values that soldiers supposedly have. Hughes is pointing out that these noble virtues of honour and human dignity etc. mean little or nothing when you're facing the heat of battle. The ‘etcetera’ is essentially saying ‘King, honour, human dignity, blahdy blahdy blah’. We can read this as a harsh critique of war, especially when we remember the devastation the war caused on 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 million miles away from the reality of war. The fact that the soldier is referred to as ‘he’ all the way throughout the poem backs up the notion that this is a poem which is not about one specific soldier. It's about all soldiers. It's a general critique of war. The final line of the poem is brutal. Having questioned what he's doing and why, the soldier runs on. ‘His terror’s touchy dynamite’ So, despite his objections, the soldier’s become a killing machine. This alliterative metaphor perfectly sums up the danger he can potentially inflict upon others. Guys, I hope this has been useful. I have not by any means covered every single image in the poem, but I hope that I've given you lots of evidence to analyze the language and structure of this poem and how it can be seen to describe not just war, not bravery or what it's like in battle, but how war is so terrible it cannot adequately be described. Please do subscribe to the channel and give the video a thumbs up.