Key Quote
“"King, honour, human dignity, etcetera / Dropped like luxuries"”
Ted Hughes · Bayonet Charge
Focus: “etcetera”
The dismissive 'etcetera' devastates the entire language of patriotic duty — all the grand abstractions that motivated the soldier to fight are revealed as worthless in the face of mortal terror.
Technique 1 — BATHOS & DISMISSIVE REGISTER
Hughes uses bathos — a sudden, deliberate descent from the elevated to the trivial. 'King, honour, human dignity' are the grand abstractions of patriotic discourse; 'etcetera' dismisses them all with a single, casual word. The Latin term (meaning 'and the rest') reduces the entire lexicon (vocabulary) of national duty to an afterthought — a list too tedious to complete.
The simile 'Dropped like luxuries' redefines these values as non-essential — items discarded in an emergency, like throwing baggage from a sinking ship. Hughes reverses the expected hierarchy: physical survival is the only reality; everything else — patriotism, honour, humanity — is expendable. This is a direct challenge to the jingoistic language that sent millions to war.
Key Words
RAD — REGRESS
The soldier undergoes a brutal regression from rational human being to pure animal instinct. The poem begins in medias res (in the middle of action) with the soldier already running; by the end, thought has been entirely replaced by physical reflex. Hughes charts the dehumanisation of combat — the soldier does not choose to charge but is propelled by 'the cold clockwork of the stars and the nations', reduced to a cog in a machine beyond his comprehension.
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Technique 2 — ENJAMBMENT & KINETIC ENERGY
Hughes uses relentless enjambment (lines spilling over without punctuation) to create a breathless, headlong momentum: 'Suddenly he awoke and was running — raw / In raw-seamed hot khaki'. The reader is physically carried forward, unable to pause, mirroring the soldier's experience of being swept along by forces beyond his control.
The central image of the hare — 'a yellow hare that rolled like a flame / And crawled in a threshing circle' — functions as a displaced mirror for the soldier. The hare, shot and dying in 'a threshing circle', is the animal equivalent of the soldier: an innocent creature caught in violence it cannot understand. Hughes uses this pathetic (evoking pity) image to strip away all rhetoric and expose combat as simple, terrible, purposeless slaughter.
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Context (AO3)
HUGHES & WWI MEMORY
Although Hughes was born in 1930 (too young for either World War), his father survived the Battle of Gallipoli (1915) — one of the war's most disastrous campaigns. Hughes grew up with his father's traumatic silence about the war, and 'Bayonet Charge' attempts to imaginatively reconstruct the experience of combat. The poem reflects the post-WWII generation's attempt to process inherited trauma through literature.
ANTI-WAR POETRY TRADITION
Hughes writes in the tradition of WWI poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, who dismantled romantic notions of war. But Hughes goes further: while Owen preserved the soldier's humanity (pity, compassion), Hughes reduces the soldier to pure animal terror. This reflects mid-20th century existentialist thought — the idea that in extreme situations, human 'meaning' collapses and only biological survival remains.
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WOW — THE BODY WITHOUT ORGANS (Deleuze & Guattari)
Hughes's soldier can be read through Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the Body without Organs (BwO) — a body stripped of its social programming, reduced to pure intensity and sensation. The soldier loses his identity as citizen, patriot, and rational agent; what remains is a assemblage of terror, muscle, and momentum. Hughes suggests that war does not reveal a person's true character — it obliterates character entirely, leaving only the biological machine. This anticipates the concept of biopolitics (Foucault) — the idea that modern states exercise power over citizens' bodies. The soldier's body is state property: trained, deployed, and expended. Hughes's poem is a visceral protest against the instrumentalisation (treating as a tool) of human life — the moment where a young man becomes a weapon aimed at another young man, both stripped of everything except the imperative to survive.
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