The Color Purple Poem Summary

There is nothing left of the skull, all of the humanity has been ripped out of the skull. Nothing lays there except for bone. Not only does Sheers hint at death but also the idea of life. When we think of birds and eggs we think of life and nurturing. Once the soldiers go to battle this is taken away from them, they’re never going to be able to have their own children. The possibilities to new life are gone. Not only did the men die as a country, but as a team too. All of the soldiers are ‘all mimicked now in flint’. You can’t tell the difference between the human bones and the stones that would be left on the field. One of the main weapons used on the battlefield was machine guns in which we are aware of after reading stanza 3. The soldiers where ‘told to walk, not
By ‘foreign body’ Sheers wasn’t only describing something introduced from the outside but also referring to the Welsh soldiers that died whilst fighting in foreign soil. In stanza 5, Sheers refers back to the loss of lives- ‘twenty men were found in one long grave’. Even after death the soldiers were still together as a team showing comradeship. They were linked arm in arm almost as if they ‘paused mid dance-macabre’. They’re ’a broken mosaic of bone’. The fact that the soldiers died ‘in boots that outlasted them’ is a poignant reminder that at one point they were alive and wearing the boots fighting in a war that was no longer about liberation but revenge and anger. The boots were stronger than the men. The heaviness of the boots against the dead soldiers shows fragility. It’s ironic how the boots outlived the wearer. Again in line 17, Sheers reinforces the idea of the corpses. ‘Their heads tilted back at an angle and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open’. Those who didn’t have jaws possibly had them blown off or they were invisible under all of the cuts and