Bayonet charge

• ‘Patriotic tear’
• ‘a rifle as numb as a smashed arm’
• what could you connote from the quote ‘rifle as numb as a smashed arm’?

  he is numb to the usage of the rifle. the simile connotes that his rifle is an extension of him showing his patriotism and how he detaches his emotion and morals when fighting
• what is a the technique used when the poem begins with ‘suddenly‘?


  in media res, we are thrown straight into the action of war similarly to the soldier himself
• ‘King, honour, human dignity, etcetera‘
• ‘dropped like luxuries‘
• what does the quote ‘dropped like luxuries‘ suggest?


  he once treasured ’king, honour, human dignity etcetera‘ but now he is simply trying to survive
• what are some words included in the semantic field of ’hot’?


  ‘sweat’, ‘fire’, ‘molten’
• ‘yellow hare’
• ‘crawled in a threshing circle’
• What is the effect of the repetition of ‘raw’ in the first two lines?


  The narrator is confused and overwhelmed, not sure what to say
• What’s the effect of such a large number of similes in the poem?


  It shows the poets inability to describe the horrors of war so compares it to something he does know
• true or false, ted Hughes never went to war?


  true, he was born long after WW1