LO: To analyse ‘Mametz Wood’ using FLIRTS

10 minutes SILENT annotation! Get out your copy of the poem and begin your annotation. 10 minutes SILENT annotation! Things to look for: Language techniques Time periods covered/ tense of words Meaning Rhyme and rhythm Effect on the reader

Background Information Mametz Wood by Owen Sheers Background Information 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.

Do you have any idea what the acronym ‘FLIRTS’ could stand for? Form Language Imagery Rhythm Tone Subject Do you have any idea what the acronym ‘FLIRTS’ could stand for?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJV4QA_-tlo Annotate your poem using the video!

Paired Discussion Explain what period of time is covered by stanzas 1–3 and what period of time is covered by stanzas 5–7. Annotate your poem to show this.

Mametz Wood Owen Sheers (2005) For years afterwards the farmers found them – the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades as they tended the land back into itself. A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade, the relic of a finger, the blown and broken bird’s egg of a skull, all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white across this field where they were told to walk, not run, towards the wood and its nesting machine guns. And even now the earth stands sentinel, reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin. This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave, a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm, their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre in boots that outlasted them, their socketed heads tilted back at an angle and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open. As if the notes they had sung have only now, with this unearthing, slipped from their absent tongues.

Why do you think stanza 4 has been placed in the middle of the poem? PEEZ Why do you think stanza 4 has been placed in the middle of the poem? (Hint: look back at your answer to the last question.) Stanza 4 has been placed in the middle of the poem because it is the only stanza that is set… “___________________________” This suggests that the memory of the war is saddening and must not be forgotten. A technique used here is __________. It is effective because… A particularly powerful word here is “______” because it has connotations of __________________ which links to the message of…

Peer Assessment Swap books and annotate the different sections of PEEZ. Mark using two stars and a wish – remember to link to how well they have used PEEZ and whether they have answered the question.

At the start of the fourth stanza, Sheers returns to the present time, personifying the earth as it “stands sentinel,” creating the impression that it is watching over the field and the remnants of the battle. It is “reaching back into itself for reminders,” an alliterative phrase that personifies the land, conveying the idea that it cannot let go of the memories of the war. Sheers packs imagery into this stanza, using both a simile and alliteration in the last line. He compares the field to a “wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin,” as though the fragments of bone are alien and need to be pushed up and then removed from the soil.