Siegfried Sassoon

 Decorated soldier Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was born on 8 September 1886.

 Son of a wealthy Arab Jewish merchant who was disinherited for marrying outside the
Jewish faith
 Took part in WWI on the Western front despite publishing poetry before the war
 Won MC for showing bravery in the war
 Starting writing poetry against war, describing its horrors, gory details and senseless
killings
 Was admitted to Military psychiatric hospital for writing a letter "Finished With the War:
Soldiers' Declaration" in 1917 to the military authorities about his protest against the war
 It was forwarded to the press and read out in the House of Commons by a sympathetic
member of Parliament, the letter was seen by some as treasonous by some
 Then then Under-Secretary of State for War, Ian Macpherson, decided that he was unfit
for service and had him sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, where he was
officially treated for neurasthenia "shell shock"
 Has been in touch with Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen, all war poets
 He was also a friend of E. M. Foster, Thomas Hardy and Frankie Schuster
 Experimented with novel writing such as Memories of a Fox-hunting Man and Memoires
of an Infantry Officer
 He died in 1951
 On 11 November 1985, Sassoon was among sixteen Great War poets commemorated on a
slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.[27] The inscription on the
stone was written by friend and fellow War poet Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is
War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity

Poetic Output

 Counter-Attack and Other Poems collects some of Sassoon's best war poems, all
of which are "harshly realistic laments or satires"
 The later collection The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon included 64 poems of
the war, most written while Sassoon was in hospital recovering from his injuries.
Public reaction to Sassoon's poetry was fierce. Some readers complained that the
poet displayed little patriotism, while others found his shockingly realistic
depiction of war to be too extreme. Even pacifist friends complained about the
violence and graphic detail in his work. But the British public bought the books
because, in his best poems, Sassoon captured the feeling of trench warfare and the
weariness of British soldiers for a war that seemed never to end. "The dynamic
quality of his war poems," according to a critic for the Times Literary
Supplement, "was due to the intensity of feeling which underlay their cynicism."
"In the history of British poetry," McDowell wrote, "[Sassoon] will be
 remembered primarily for some one hundred poems ... in which he protested the
continuation of World War I."

After the war, Sassoon became involved in Labour Party politics, lectured on pacifism,
and continued to write. His most successful works of this period were his trilogy of
autobiographical novels, The Memoirs of George Sherston. In these, he gave a thinly-
fictionalized account, with little changed except names, of his wartime experiences,
contrasting them with his nostalgic memories of country life before the war and
recounting the growth of his pacifist feelings. Some have maintained that Sassoon's best
work is his prose, particularly the first two Sherston novels. Memoirs of a Fox Hunting
Man was described by a critic for the Springfield Republican as "a novel of wholly fresh
and delightful content," and Robert Littrell of Bookman called it "a singular and a
strangely beautiful book."

That book's sequel was also well received. The New Statesman critic called Memoirs of
an Infantry Officer "a document of intense and sensitive humanity." In a review for the
Times Literary Supplement, after Sassoon's death, one critic wrote: "His one real
masterpiece, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer ... is consistently fresh. His self scrutiny is
candid, critical, and humourous.... If Sassoon had written as well as this consistently, he
would have been a figure of real stature. As it is, English literature has one great work
from him almost by accident."

Sassoon's critical biography of Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith was also
well received. In this volume, he recounted numerous anecdotes about Meredith,
portraying him vividly as a person as well as an author: "The reader lays the book down
with the feeling that a great author has become one of his close neighbors," wrote G. F.
Whicher in the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review. The critical portions of
the book were also praised, though some found the writing careless. But the New Yorker
critic noted Sassoon's "fresh and lively literary criticism," and the reviewer for the Times
Literary Supplement declared that "Mr. Sassoon gives us a poet's estimate, considered
with intensity of insight, skilfully shaped as biography, and written with certainty of
style."

In 1957 Sassoon became a convert to Catholicism, though for some time before his
conversion, his spiritual concerns had been the predominant subject of his writing. These
later religious poems are usually considered markedly inferior to those written between
1917 and 1920. Yet Sequences (published shortly before his conversion) has been praised
by some critics. Derek Stanford, in Books and Bookmen, claimed that "the poems in
Sequences constitute some of the most impressive religious poetry of this century."

Speaking of Sassoon's war poetry in a 1981 issue of the Spectator, P. J. Kavanagh

claimed that "today they ring as true as they ever did; it is difficult to see how they could
be better." Looking back over Sassoon's long literary career, Peter Levi wrote in Poetry
Review: "One can experience in his poetry the slow, restless ripening of a very great
 talent; its magnitude has not yet been recognised.... He is one of the few poets of his
generation we are really unable to do without."

SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

At this point Sassoon’s poem “Suicide in the Trenches” evokes the image of a young man, a
child, in despair. According to the title of the poem, we realize that it refers war. The title
suggests the suicide of somebody in a trench. The words “soldier boy” stated at the end of the 1 st
verse, criticise the early age of the soldiers in the First Wold War. The poem is separated into
three stanzas that have four verses each. The verses rhyme with the next in pairs of two (a-a-b-b,
c-c-d-d, e-e-f-f) and all the verses have eight syllables. Some of the youngsters that enlisted in
the army had no aspirations for the future and thought a good option to go to war and come back,
with a good range in the army. The “empty joy” in verse 2, tries to explain the lack of aims in life
that these extremely young soldiers had and, which is more important, the sadness, though a
contrast, and verses 3 and 4 show his loneliness and his inability to rest at night as stated in verse
3 “slept soundly”, which is another contrast. The rhythm words “dark” and “lark” give us an
obscure view of the situation and both could mean death because of the dark atmosphere they
create for the reader.

The soldier’s mood is well defined in verse 5 “cowed and glum” and those words show us
that this child, unable to find solace in the trenches, is unhappy and desperate. Bad conditions
soldiers suffered in the war are stated in the 6th verse; “Crumps and lice” were very common
among soldiers and here the poet is using this word to criticise the dreadful hygienic conditions.

Another important aspect Sassoon remembers in verse 6 is the “lack of rum”. Rum was the
soldier’s relief and best friend, because it made them forget the bad moments and the images of
war. But, as everything in war, rum started to be scarce, and only a few soldiers could drink it.
This increased the suicides of soldiers as told in the 7th and 8th verses.
 The last stanza from verses 9 to 12, is a satirical view of Sassoon’s greatest criticism and
determination to revenge of those “smug-faced crowds”, in verse 9, who “cheer when soldiers
march by”, in verse 10. He hated those who considered to be making a profit out of the war and
those who were happy and proud their children going to serve their country: A patriotic feeling.

The 3rd quatrain also remarks the crowd’s hypocrisy and apparent patriotism. For Sassoon
war is evil and that’s why he uses contrasting tones, pathos and judging eye. These literary
resources help him to emit his hate towards war and its consequences. To end up with this
analysis I’d like to point out that the author tries to create sorrow towards the young soldier (in
the reader) and this is the main reason why the author uses connotations of dark colours,
contrasts and an ironic tone when he send them home to pray recriminating them not to know the
hell where the soldier’s laughter and youth goes being “Hell” a metaphor of war.

Finally, in my opinion, the poem is a good view on the war and its worst consequence:
suicide, but I think that Sassoon’s real intention when writing this poem was to criticise health
conditions, loneliness, patriotism and the lack of resources the soldiers faced in the trenches.

1. Attack,

Attack
By Siegfried Sassoon

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun

In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun,

Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud

The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,

Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.

The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed

With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,

Men jostle and climb to, meet the bristling fire.

Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,

They leave their trenches, going over the top,

While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,

And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,

Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

The imagery of the first few lines sets up the battle well. A hilltop, scarred with war, surrounded
by smoke, presumably from shelling, while the sun rises over the ridge. Tanks are trying to
breach wire barriers, toppling over, the barrage becoming ever more intense. The world is
exploding with the rise of the sun, and it's captivating and terrible.

Trench warfare was one of the ugliest things in the history of war. When men sortied out over
the top, it was often to be slaughtered, and inside the trench, when the gas bombs dropped, they
became choking, horrifying places. None of the imagery in this poem is heroic. It is all clumsy
and pitiful, and rightly so. The men here are "bowed" by the weight of their weaponry, they
"jostle" to get in position, they have "grey, muttering faces, masked with fear." And for what
purpose do they jostle and climb? They do it to "meet the bristling fire." To die.

This is not a pleasant or honorable rendezvous with death as Seeger liked to imagine. This is a
world in which "hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, flounders in mud." Even hope
cannot sustain. It is grappling and losing, spattered in mud, unable to go one. Time ticks away
on the wristwatches of the soldiers, assuredly an image of mortality, of limited time. The
agonized exclamation of the final line best sums up the attitude of the world, and of ever soldier,
by 1918, when this poem was published. "O Jesus, make it stop!" Not a prayer for victory, but
just an end. That's the nature of war in Sassoon's poetry, and it's infinitely more worthwhile than
Seeger's hollow ideas about death.