English Lit - Bayonet Charge

• Bayonet Charge by Ted Hughes is a poem about a World War One soldier
• Ted Hughes was born in 1930, long after the end of World War One, so the poem's not based on his own personal experience
• The poem is an imagined account of a World War One soldier
• The poem begins mid-action with a soldier charging towards the enemy with a rifle in hand


  1. Soldier running and stumbling across a field towards a hedge

  2. Hearing the sound of gunfire

  3. Patriotism replaced by panic
• In the second stanza, the soldier begins to contemplate what he is doing and why

  Feels there's no point in war
• In the third and final stanza, the focus shifts to a hair that has found itself caught up in the midst of the battle

  1. Poet's use of language in the final stanza contains a mocking tone

  2. Hughes criticizes the patriotism of soldiers

  3. Points out that noble virtues mean little when facing the true horror of war
• Poem focuses on the reality of war and how its true horror is ultimately indescribable


  • Poem begins mid-action, leaving the reader confused and unsure of what is happening, just like the frightened soldier
  • Enjambment and caesura create a disjointed, disordered effect on the reader, reflecting the chaos of war
  • Repetition of the word "raw" reflects the shock the soldier experiences
  • Overwhelming use of similes suggests the poet's inability to fully describe the moment
• In the final stanza, the soldier questions what he is doing and why


  Despite his objections, the soldier has become a killing machine
• The poem is a critique of war, comparing well with other poems such as Exposure, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and War Photographer
• ‘Suddenly he awoke and he was running’ (the poem

  opens in media res)
• ‘The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye / sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest’
• ‘In bewilderment then he almost stopped / In what cold clockwork’
• ‘Threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flame / And crawled in a threshing circle, its mouth wide / Open silent’
• King, honour, human dignity, etcetera / Dropped like luxuries’
• Hughes seeks to highlight the true horrors of

  war; there is a sense in the poem that the sense of patriotic duty leaves the young soldier as he realises what war is really like. Hughes seems to be suggesting that propaganda is seling young men a lie
• Hughes presents the idea that honour that young men may get for defending King and country is in many regards meaningless, as this ideal of honour no longer valuable to them, as they realise the actions they are expected to conduct in the moral grey area
• The dehumanisation of men in war is portrayed, as men are shown to be almost machine-like in war and disassociated from reality
• The speaker: 'The terrifying experience of leaving the trench to charge directly at the enemy with a bayonet (a long knife) attached to your rifle'
• The poem


  • Depicts a very brief period of war
  • Reader can step inside the body and mind of the young soldier
  • Soldier almost seems disassociated from reality
  • Soldier seems to be an unthinking dangerous weapon of war
• The injured hare


  Jolts the soldier back to consciousness
• The soldier briefly seems to consider the moral grey area of war, and perhaps if his actions are truly justifiable even in war
• The soldier realises his own vulnerability and danger


  He begins to charge unthinking and machine-like towards the enemy