As The Team's Head Brass Analysis

Life is an endless cycle of death and rebirth, where the death of one thing means life for another. Edward Thomas’ “As The Team’s Head Brass”, a poem about a young man talking about the ongoing World War 1 with a farmer ploughing his field, illustrates how the passage of time allows new life to grow from the ashes of the old. Thomas contrasts punctuation and enjambments to show the passage of time. In the beginning of the poem, few of the lines have punctuation, and enjambments can run on for several lines. This has the effect of rushing the reader and forcing them to read through lines without significant pauses in between, showing the faster passage of time at the beginning of the poem. In the middle of the poem, every line has some form of punctuation, and enjambments are seldom used. Thomas’ frequent use of punctuation necessitates pauses in the middle of many lines,
The ploughman and the speaker talk about a “fallen elm” (3) destroyed by “the blizzard” (13). They then go on to talk about one of the ploughman’s mates, who was killed in France “the very night of the blizzard” (28). This sets up an equivalency between the fallen elm and the fallen man, and also between the blizzard and the war. The speaker sits “among the boughs of the fallen elm” (3), by “a woodpecker’s round hole” (14), and talks about how he could spare an arm in the war but would not like to lose a leg or his head. This equates the ploughman’s dead mate to the fallen tree – his arms are like the boughs of the elm, his body the roots, and the woodpecker’s hole the bullet wound that killed him. This equivalency also links the blizzard and the war. The blizzard that felled this tree, and undoubtedly many others, is equivalent to the war, which had felled many men. These equivalencies show that even though these living things were vastly different in their life, they are ultimately the same in