Bayonet Charge

• 'His terrors touchy dynamite'

  • An effective conclusion: the alliterative ’t' sounds represent his fear, as if the slightest touch will make him jump. The word ‘touchy’ suggests nerves stretched to the limit. ‘Dynamite’ represents the explosiveness of the weapons, and his equally explosive fear.
  • The length of the last four lines get progressively shorter, as if he is being consumed by the horror and words are disappearing in the face of overwhelming desperation to survive. He wants only to ‘get out’, to escape.
• “sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest”


  • The patriotism he previously held in his heart leaves from the centre of his chest.
  • 'sweating molten iron' has painful connotations showing how the soldier is physically pained by the realisation that his ideals have been disproven.
• -“king, honour, human dignity, etcetera, dropped like human luxuries” 


  To show how the soldier gains honour from fighting for his king and country. These values are abandoned when the reality of war is revealed.
• 'Suddenly he awoke and was running'


  • The reader is left feeling confused and a tense atmosphere is established, which reflects the confusion and panic soldiers would have felt in war which allows the reader to relate to their experiences, and therefore empathise with them.
  • Hughes needs the readers to have essentially experienced war through his poetry, and the first step towards this is by inciting the emotions created by war, so the readers can understand what the soldier is experiencing.
• 'In what cold clockwork...was he the hand pointing that second?'

  • “cold clockwork” shows the arbitrary yet inevitable nature of the war, in which nations found themselves drawn into conflict through political mismanagement.
  • The hard ‘c’s and 'k’ in ‘cold clockwork’ are alliterative and harsh. This long, slow line reflects the mechanical nature of the soldier’s experience, and the inexorable nature of war.
  • The “hand” could also represent God: He may be questioning why God would cause so much suffering.
• 'Threw up a yellow hare...its mouth wide, open silent'


  • The Hare is used as a symbol of soldiers’ collective suffering. Hughes projects the violence of war onto an innocent creature.
  • The explicit violence and graphic descriptions of war are provided through the hare’s “mouth wide, open silent”.
  • Hughes is trying to show that the soldier is so immune to the death of humans, that it takes a new kind of suffering for him to be shocked out of his trance and into instinctive action.