The first in the series of study notes for the GCSE AQA English Literature Paper 2 Power and Conflict Poetry starts with a commentary of “Bayonet Charge”.
“Bayonet Charge” is one of fifteen poems that GCSE students taking AQA English Literature will need to study if they are studying the “Power and Conflict” poetry for English Literature Paper 2.
The Paper
In this paper students will be given a question which names one of the fifteen poems and they will be asked to compare it to another of the fifteen poems from the list. The named poem will be printed on the exam paper, students will need to compare this to one of the other poems from memory as the other fourteen poems are not printed for pupil reference.
Example question:
Compare the ways the poets present the idea of violence in “Bayonet Charge” and one other poem from the Power and Conflict Cluster. (30 marks)
This question requires an essay style response in which students analyse and evaluate the two poems in relation to the question prompt.
One of the things I used to always find helpful when studying poetry was to analyse and write up an analytical commentary of each poem, exploring the range of ideas and concepts that I considered were presented in the poem. I would then use this to generate revision card notes and practice exam questions.
An analytical commentary of “Bayonet Charge”
The title, “Bayonet Charge”, immediately presents the idea of close combat and physical violence; this poem captures the moment that a charge of assault takes place on the battlefield and connotes the onslaught of such assaults. In choosing a bayonet, a weapon that can only be utilised face to face with an enemy, as well as the singular focus on one particular, albeit anonymous, soldier, Hughes is asserting that every “charge” and every war is made up of individual soldiers, each facing great personal threat and sacrifice for “king” and “honour”.
The energy of the “charge” is emphasised by the opening adverbial phrase: “suddenly he awoke and was running” capturing the abruptness of the charge and the unconscious, automatic response of the soldier who awakes and, without thinking, robotically responds to the urgency of the charge. Hughes’ portrayal of the soldier’s instinctive response illustrates how quickly war reconditions men who here are presented to be fighting for a cause that they neither believe in or understand. The “hot khaki” emphasises the metaphorical pressure of the uniform that restrains, controls and defines them as soldiers; it is fundamentally uncomfortable both “hot” and “raw-seamed” which contradicts the upheld beliefs, fuelled by propaganda, that to wear the uniform and fight for your country is an honour; instead, Hughes asserts through his metaphor, that it is an agonising toil.
Stanza one is littered with dynamic verbs that illustrate both the energy and the mindlessness of front-line war. In line one the soldier is “running” by line three he is already “stumbling” towards a hedge that “dazzled with rifle fire”. His fortunes are bleakly depicted through Hughes’ clumsy portrayal, he is tired and struggling as he “lugs” his rifle that is “numb as a smashed arm”. The energy of the charge and the instant response to action is almost immediately undermined by these strenuous verbs which portray the physical difficulty that the soldier endures in battle, his body seems ill equipped to fight. Furthermore, the simile “numb as a smashed arm” implies that it is not just his own body that has been worn down by war, but his weapon has too, that it is being described “like a smashed arm” could suggest it too is broken. The way that Hughes couples the imagery of the soldier with a broken rifle heading towards a hedge that “dazzled with rifle fire” is perhaps deliberately contrived to highlight the personal sacrifice and the improbability of this soldier’s survival.
Despite presenting the personal sacrifice of war though the anecdote of one soldier, the poet remains largely impersonal, a tone which perhaps captures the central message of conflict that wars are fought by people who become faceless, anonymous and irrelevant bodies to the countries that they fight for. The brutal image of “bullets smacking the belly out of the air” ultimately reduces the men to “bellies”, targets for the opposition and mere disposable pawns to their countries who they signed up to fight for.
Towards the end of the first stanza Hughes alludes to the “patriotic tear” of pride and honour in the past tense which no longer brims in his eye but sweats now “like molten iron from the centre of his chest”. The structural use of enjambment here reflects how quickly the pride of patriotism becomes anger, fury and simmering rage; when the soldiers face the reality of war this smouldering resentment is eventually linguistically transformed into “touchy dynamite” the symbolic breaking point for the soldier who cannot endure much more.
The structure of the poem falters between the first and second stanza, the moment that the soldier, “in bewilderment”, “almost stopped”; the caesuras at the end of the lines reflecting that fleeting moment where he reconsiders his purpose. Hughes only affords the soldier this brief moment before the urgency of his situation triumphs which is perhaps Hughes’ way of asserting that war always prevails, any moment of doubt or reflection is destroyed by the “shot slashed furrows” and reduces men to brainwashed robots of war who mindlessly fight “listening between footfalls for the reason”.
There is a profound moment of reflection in the second stanza where Hughes compounds the simultaneous significance and insignificance of the soldiers through the rhetorical question:
“In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations
Was he the hand pointing that second?”
This complex metaphorical image of space and time contemplates the soldier’s seemingly marginal part in the grand scheme of the “cold” stars and nations, an adjective which arguably renounces the soldier’s value to his own country who are “cold”, unfeeling and callous in their exploitation of him. By contrast to the vastness of the stars and nations, we are offered just one soldier’s “hand pointing [the] second”, a mere second in time, seemingly so inconsequential but that one second here is literally life or death. Through this image Hughes insists the value of the individual soldier who here, at a split moment in time, is the sole representative of his nation who neither knows or cares for him, he is the one who in that second will live or die, kill or be killed and that significance made clear for the reader to grasp. The irony presented is that despite this significance, in that moment, the soldier comprehends how very insignificant he is to his country for whom his life is disposable and immaterial.
Although Hughes afford this ephemeral moment an entire stanza, the briefness of contemplation is asserted both through the time reference that he was the hand pointing the “second” as well as the image of the soldier “statuary in mid-stride”, an image which cannot remain still and is bound to continue. Almost forcing the soldier to continue in battle is the relentlessness of the opposition, again depersonalised as “rifle fire” and “shot slashed furrows” as though the soldiers do not see their own opposition in flesh terms, perhaps a way of coping with the task at hand.
The final stanza propels the poem to its and the soldier’s doubtful conclusion. The ambiguous image of the “yellow hare”, typically an image of prey and vulnerability, crawling in a “threshing circle” its “mouth wide”, “silent” and its eyes agape arguably represents the perilous improbability of a soldier caught in no man’s land; stunned, silent and helplessly “crawling” as though reduced to an infantile state. An image that all too well represents the soldiers themselves, helplessly caught out facing the enormity of the armed enemy at the opposing hedge. The soldier’s disregard of this metaphorical yellow hare as he “plunged past” regardless perhaps reflects the disregard he now holds for his own and his comrades lives for war has desensitised him to the horrors.
This is not all that is disregarded according to Hughes, “King, honour, human dignity, etcetera” are all “dropped like luxuries in a yelling alarm”. War is not about the many lies that are told through propaganda, these ideas are as disposable as the men themselves when they are faced with the prospect of life or death. Hughes employs an asyndetic list here to reflect the countless deceptive ideas that are lost on the battlefield, the use of enjambment reflects how quickly and easily these ideas are “dropped” when faced with one’s own mortality.
The poem concludes with the equivocal idea of the soldier’s “touchy dynamite” which could reflect that he is ready to explode. Like dynamite which is manufactured with that purpose, perhaps Hughes is suggesting that one way or another this is a soldier’s destiny too, they are literally sent to war as weapons, not people, with the intention of causing mass destruction. Through focusing on one soldier’s journey here, Hughes is able to capture the destruction that war poses to the individuals as well as humanity as a whole; as people are turned into weapons, there really is little hope offered for the future of this soldier, or indeed all the others, who are bombs poised to explode.
Maria Moyles is an Advanced Skills Teacher and Lead Practitioner of English as well as a GCSE examiner for the current 1-9 GCSE in English Literature and co-founder of Learn North West Education.
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