Nineteen-fifteen - John Drinkwater

Form
- Four quatrains

- Rhyming couplets

-iambic tetrameter

- It’s a poem, obviously.

- The stanza’s are all of equal length of four lines with a regular rhyme scheme to once again add to the romanticised tone of the poem.


Language
- Bucolic, idealised, utopian , bountiful, rich salubrious , fertile imagery shows the cycle of life

- "Black" pine tree - charred but still standing - nature stubbornly carrying on

- Vernal images of "green"fields  reinforce this idea

- Archaic language suggests that nature has persisted throughout time

- Futility - man achieves so much and yet rejects it

- Mocks man who sees himself as "master of all" - Irony

-        The writer uses a lot of images of fertility and wholesomeness; this is contradictoryto the horrors of war which the writer alludes to with words such as‘ploughed’.

- ‘Ploughed’ may initially suggest farming hinting that it is a symbol for fertility and fruitfulness. However, it may have sinister undertones that the men are bred for slaughter; they are ‘ploughed’down hinting they are aggressively all mowed down by machine guns.

-        Time is personified as mocking and sardonic which may foreshadow death. The writer uses the metaphor of the‘black pine tree’ which immediately changes the tone of the poem; the colour imagery of ‘black’ implies bleakness and that war has taken away images of light from the world leaving a dark one filled with horror and bleakness. It may also imply nature is punishing man. The caesuras at this point (‘time, which is now a black pine tree’) separates the positivity of the land with the death of nature. This may suggest a separation between fertility and the destruction of man making it a paradox.

-        The poem is set pre-Somme so it may be an allusion to the land before the Somme. The writer talks about the fertility of the land and describes a paradoxical world in the Somme Battle.

-There are religious connotations; Psalm 23 is hinted to through ‘the pasture’which implies God is ordering the men to die which appears strange against the bucolic backdrop the writer depicts.

Structure:

- Ends with a sarcastic question to undermine man's authority

-Powerful images of nature feature in every stanza to suggests that it dominates
-      The poem is written in iambic quatrameter to show a romanticized tone and a Georgian style of writing; this adds to the idea of the bucolic life before the Somme and then the destruction during and after the battle.

-        There is a lack of enjambment to show the slow shift between pre-battle and battle; it hints of the progressions of more advanced machinery and more inhumanity.


Tone:
- Bucholic , natural

- Foolishness of man

-The tone is romanticised but has bitter undertones about how man can destroy nature and therefore nature works against man.

-There is no succinct relationship between nature and man as man chooses to override what it has with its creation of battles and destruction.

Reader response:

- The reader may feel angered by humanity's blind engineering of its own downfall

- Perhaps a sense of admiration towards nature's solidarity

Links :
- In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'

- Channel Firing

- It can be linked to any of the ‘Happy is England Now’ section because of the romanticised tone; they can be compared to show the different messages. How does the writer use these romantic tones to depict different messages?

-        It could be linked to ‘Exposure’ by Wilfred Owen; he talks about the cold so it could be compared in terms of nature there. However, Owen uses more pathetic fallacy rather than bucolic images.

-        It may link to ‘To the One Who Was With Me In The War’ because of the perception of time.