mametz quotes

• for years afterwards the farmers found them


  vague pronouns take away the soldiers individuality
• wasted young


  decaying bodies or the lives being lost too soon
• china plate of a shoulder blade


  soldier is fragile and an everyday object which dehumanises him and suggests weakness
• relic of finger


  part of a saints that is worshiped suggesting admiration for those who died
• blown and broken bird's egg of a skull


  alliteration contrasts the violence with the fragility
• nesting machine guns


  implies the weapons are a part of nature now
• even now the earth stands sentinel


  healing is a long process

  personifies earth preserving the bones in a calm and determined way
• foreign body


  the soldiers don't belong there and it is unnatural
• this morning , twenty men buried in one long grave


  volta

  poem shifts from talking about the earth to about bodies of soldier
• broken mosaic of bone


  juxtaposition as mosaic is contrasted with the broken bones
• skeletons paused mid dance-macabre


  dark humour reminds us of the soldiers being alive and taken to death
• those that have them


  reminds reader horror of injuries
• the notes they sung


  imagery of birds

  contrasts with violence
• slipped from their absent tongues


  discovering them gave them a voice they lacked

  gentle imagery ends poem with a sense of peace