How does Thomas present war in "As the Team's Head Brass"
by
supergaben (student)
Discuss ways in which Thomas presents war in As the Team’s Head-Brass
In the poem, Thomas makes quite a few references and allusions to war. He uses the nature and weather described in the poems as metaphors for various aspects of the war. The blizzard that is mentioned in the poem could be interpreted as a metaphor for either death or war. “In France they killed him; it was back in march, the very night of the blizzard, too.” He chose blizzard due to the nature of them, violent, and hard to see through, possibly a reference to the “Fog of war”.
The elm tree can be interpreted as an allusion to the dead soldiers, which have been killed by the metaphorical blizzard, the fact that Thomas mentions that the friend was killed on the night of the blizzard reinforces this allusion, and he uses words that are normally associated with dead combatants, such as “fallen” to reinforce this idea. “By a woodpeckers round hole” this could be interpreted as a bullet wound adding to the interpretation that the elm tree represents a dead soldier, also the way he specifically mentions that it’s a woodpecker hole, instead of just a normal hole could be a reference to machine guns, which were said to sound like woodpeckers. The way he has described the way the elm tree has fallen also brings images of dead soldiers, he describes it “strewed” which gives the image of the tree being messily felled and destroyed, almost like it’s a corpse in the field that’s just been left there, like the way bodies were just left to rot in No Man’s Land. He alliteratively likens the war and weather “about the weather, next about the war” which are common themes in his poems, normally using weather as a metaphor for things such as war, rather than directly stating it.
