Skirrid Hill (2005)
Detailed analysis of every key poem in Sheers' collection, with quotations, form analysis, themes, and comparisons to Heaney.
Collection Overview
Title Significance
- Skirrid Fawr = mountain near Abergavenny, South Wales
- Legend: mountain split at moment of Christ's crucifixion
- Symbolic: rupture, division, woundedness, fracture
- Metaphor: broken relationships, divided histories, fragmented identities
Major Themes
Detailed Poem Analyses
Archaeological elegy in seven tercets, tracing the discovery of Welsh soldiers' remains in the fields around Mametz Wood on the Somme, where the 38th (Welsh) Division suffered catastrophic losses in July 1916. The poem moves from repeated, habitual discovery ('for years afterwards the farmers found them') to a specific present-tense unearthing ('this morning, twenty men'), before closing on a single image of song released from the dead. The structure enacts the poem's core argument: the past is not buried but perpetually surfacing, the land itself a living archive of violence.
Stanza 1 refuses to let the battle be a single historical event: 'For years afterwards the farmers found them — / the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades / as they tended the land back into itself.' 'Wasted' meaning both destroyed and squandered; farming and unearthing the dead are the same activity. Stanza 2 catalogues fragmented body parts through domestic and natural comparators: 'A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade, / the relic of a finger, the blown / and broken bird's egg of a skull.' Each image makes the dead both pitiable and precious — 'relic' introduces the sacred register, connecting remains to religious relics of saints.
Stanza 3 delivers the poem's most devastating historical fact in the plainest syntax: 'where they were told to walk, not run, / towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.' The passive construction removes agency; 'nesting' is the poem's bitterest irony — guns nest as birds nest. Stanza 4 provides the central metaphor: 'the earth stands sentinel... like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.' The bodies are foreign bodies in a wound; the earth's natural processes push them upward as skin pushes out a splinter.
Stanza 5 shifts to specific present: 'This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave, / a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm, / their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre.' The mass grave made intimate by the number; 'linked arm in arm' — fraternal, communal, the posture of soldiers singing. Stanza 6: 'In boots that outlasted them, / their socketed heads tilted back at an angle / and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.' The parenthetical 'those that have them' is one of the most painful moments — matter-of-fact acknowledgement that some jaws are missing, inserted with ghastly casualness.
The closing stanza: 'As if the notes they had sung / have only now, with this unearthing, / slipped from their absent tongues.' The open mouths become mouths of singers; the unearthing releases the song. 'Absent tongues' — literally gone, yet the song is implied to be present. This is Sheers' elegiac consolation: not resurrection but the belated release of something that could not be spoken while the dead were buried.
Key Quotations & Analysis
“For years afterwards the farmers found them — / the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades / as they tended the land back into itself”
'Wasted' as destroyed and squandered — both military and moral charge; farming and unearthing conflated; the dead surface as naturally as crops; 'tending the land back into itself' — healing that keeps producing evidence of what was done.
“A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade, / the relic of a finger, the blown / and broken bird's egg of a skull”
Domestic and natural similes transform fragmented remains into objects of fragile beauty; 'chit' — bone reduced to a slip of paper; 'relic' introduces the sacred; 'blown' enjambment enacts the explosion that broke the skull; each image makes the dead both pitiable and precious.
“Where they were told to walk, not run, / towards the wood and its nesting machine guns”
The poem's most devastating line; passive construction removes agency, implicating command structures without naming them; 'nesting' — the poem's bitterest irony, nature's vocabulary applied to industrial killing; the absurdity of the order delivered in plain syntax without commentary.
“Like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin”
Central metaphor; the earth's memory is involuntary, biological, ongoing; the dead are foreign bodies the landscape cannot absorb; fuses the geological, biological, and historical in a single image of slow, involuntary recovery.
“This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave, / a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm, / their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre”
Shift from habitual past to specific present; mass grave made intimate by the number; 'mosaic' as art and pattern destroyed; 'linked arm in arm' — fraternal posture of men singing; 'dance-macabre' frozen mid-movement, death interrupted by the very death it enacts.
“In boots that outlasted them”
A quiet atrocity: leather more durable than flesh, material more permanent than life; the boots survive what the men could not.
“Their jaws, those that have them, dropped open”
The parenthetical 'those that have them' — clinical, matter-of-fact, devastating; the missing jaw acknowledged in passing; the most formally daring moment in the poem; ghastly casualness within the elegy.
“As if the notes they had sung / have only now, with this unearthing, / slipped from their absent tongues”
Closing elegiac consolation; the unearthing as liberation of silenced song; 'absent tongues' — literally gone, yet the song implied; 'as if' — conditional, not certainty; art as the only available form of remembrance; the elegy itself becomes the released song.
Form
Seven tercets — the same Welsh tercet form as 'The Farrier,' but here replicating the incremental emergence of bone from earth: each three-line unit delivers another fragment, another layer. No stanza offers complete resolution; each opens onto the next like successive layers of disturbed ground. Tense movement structures the poem: habitual past ('for years... found them') to specific present ('this morning') to conditional ('as if the notes... have only now... slipped'). Domestic and natural similes for the body ('china plate,' 'chit,' 'bird's egg') refuse both sentimentality and clinical distance. The wound simile is the central metaphor — geological, biological, and historical at once. Passive constructions ('they were told to walk, not run') remove individual agency, implicating command structures. 'Nesting machine guns' — pastoral language under extreme pressure, echoing Heaney's 'warbling' convoy. The parenthetical 'those that have them' is formally daring — a clinical qualification inserted mid-elegy.
Themes
Context
Sheers wrote the poem after travelling to the Somme to make a film about David Jones and Wyn Griffith, both of whom fought at Mametz Wood in July 1916. The 38th (Welsh) Division was ordered to take Mametz Wood on 7 July 1916 and suffered approximately 4,000 casualties in two days. While at the site, they uncovered a shallow grave of around twenty men — the specific discovery that triggers stanza 5. The poem participates in a specifically Welsh cultural project of recovering the 38th Division from relative historical obscurity. David Jones' In Parenthesis (1937) and Wyn Griffith's Up to Mametz (1931) are key precursors. The Swansea University study connects Sheers' landscape-as-archive technique to Heaney's bog poems — both poets treat landscape as a medium that preserves and releases the dead. Some critics argue the poem is as much about Welsh national identity as about individual loss; a counter-reading notes that Sheers' archaeological approach universalises the elegy beyond Welsh specificity. The closing image of song has been read as Sheers offering art as the only viable form of remembrance — though the 'as if' and 'absent tongues' qualify this consolation.
Comparison with Heaney (AO4)
Both Heaney and Sheers elegise war dead, but Heaney's 'In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge' is personal (one poet-soldier, directly addressed as 'you') while Sheers' is collective (a regiment, twenty unnamed men). Both use landscape as carrier of memory — Heaney's Boyne passage-graves and hawthorn, Sheers' earth yielding bones decades later. Both poems perform cultural memory-work, retrieving what was suppressed or forgotten. Sheers' archaeological approach — bone surfacing through earth — parallels Heaney's bog poems (North) where preserved bodies emerge from the bog as witnesses to ancient violence. Both refuse to simplify: Heaney's 'dead enigma' and Sheers' attention to the physical reality of death ('those that have them') insist on complexity against commemorative simplification. Both use passive constructions to identify military command without naming commanders. The crucial formal difference: Heaney addresses Ledwidge directly in second person; Sheers' address is oblique, through the archaeological image, granting the dead speech only in the final conditional 'as if.'