Bayonet charge - Ted Hughes

GCSE English Literature

1. ‘Bayonet Charge’

In the poem bayonet charge, the poet, Ted Hughes was a very creative person and much of his work as a
Archaeology major was reflected in the poem Bayonet charge through historical language and understanding.

Bayonet charge focuses on an unnamed soldier of the First World War as he focuses on travelling ‘over the
top’ of a trench during the trench warfare that was occurring at the time. The poem focuses on transforming a
normal man into a weapon as he moves and questions the identity of any soldier and what their identity
means to the leaders and superior officers who command the soldiers, whom they merely view as weapons.

Enjambment describes the technique of breaking up a sentence so that it runs over more than one line of the
poem. The almost constant enjambment through the Bayonet Charge represents the pace and chaos of the
moment as the soldier runs. The poem immediately bursts into action, “Suddenly he was awake and
running”, shocking the reader and causing them to get a sense of action and danger instantly.

The poem itself is written in three stanzas. All of the stanzas focus on the movement of the soldier as he trawls
through mud, trying to enter the enemy trenches. The first stanza particularly focuses on the movement of the
soldier for example, to quote Hughes, ‘running’ shows how fast the soldier is moving and ‘stumbling’ shows
how difficult it is for the soldier to run through the mud. This creates the image of the soldier struggling to
move in the amount of thick mud and corpses that litter the battlefield.

The second and third stanzas slow down the pace. The soldier ‘stops’ initially at the start of stanza two but
then continues running and then in stanza three, a distraction in the form of a hare is ‘thrown up’ which is
quite violent vocabulary to use when referring to such a peaceful animal. This links back to the horrors of war
and saying the hare “rolled like a flame” creates a vivid picture of a violently coloured and almost unnatural
animal in the midst of war. No wonder the soldier was distracted.

Hughes uses repetition of the word ‘running’ in stanza one and again, twice, in stanza two. He uses this to
emphasise the speed that the soldier is going at, almost as if, if he stops running, he will die. The repeated ‘h’
sound in stanza one represents the soldiers heavy breathing and grasping for breath as he runs.


In the second stanza, we see where the unnamed soldier begins to question his role in the conflict through,
“cold clockwork” almost as if the soldier is merely a machine, the hands of a clock, to be used at someone’s
disposal. The narrator also mentions “King, honour, human dignity” with a dismissive ‘etcetera’ to link to the
fact that these things do not really matter to the soldier, all that really matters to him is surviving another day
on the battlefield. Perhaps the soldier respected these things once, after seeing them on a piece of
propaganda causing him to sign up, but they do not really matter to him now, they are just dismissed almost
sarcastically as they are not really important, just another ‘etcetera’.