Assignment
War poetry
Siegfried Sassoon "The Hero"
“The Hero,” by the English poet Sigfried Sassoon (1886-1967), is one of the many notable lyrics Sassoon wrote in response to World War I. Sassoon himself was a war hero, known for his unusual bravery, but eventually he turned against the conflict which he came to consider as pointless and badly managed. This poem reflects his disillusionment with the war.
In this poem an officer delivers a consolatory letter to a grieving mother concerning the death of her soldier son, Jack. She is proud of her son’s glorious sacrifice— but, on leaving, the officer reflects wryly on Jack’s cowardice and incompetence in the line.
Jack fell as he would have wished / The mother said”: the stock figure of the grieving mother opens this poem: a familiar, emotive image of loss in war. Here, the mother uses an everyday euphemism for dying in war— “Jack fell”— that implies an honourable soldier’s death, falling in action.
“‘The Colonel writes so nicely.’ Something broke…”: Colonels, those responsible for a regiment of soldiers, wrote letters of condolence to the bereaved on behalf of the regiment. As Graves relates in ‘Goodbye to All That’, these letters were often a duty.
“‘We mothers are so proud / Of our dead soldiers.’ Then her face bowed.”: The mother speaks as if for all British soldiers: perhaps the consolation that she finds in doing so is in subsuming herself in the collective loss of all the mothers of the nation. At any rate, these words do seem more sentimental than authentic: their clichéd expression helping to repress, perhaps, the great grief of the woman.
“Quietly the Brother Officer went out”: ‘Brother Officer’ is an unusual term— an example of military language being used in a way that is jarring at the beginning of the stanza. The camaraderie of the army, the special fellowship of men in service is introduced into the poem here.
“…poor old dear …gallant lies”: these words imply a distance that the first stanza’s heartfelt scene did not hint at.
“While he coughed and mumbled…”: the officer’s awkwardness in passing on condolences is understandable. The reason for the officer’s embarrassment only later becomes obvious.
“brimmed with joy, / Because he’d been so brave, her glorious boy.”: the alliteration in these lines, expressing the devastation of the mother, is clever. The effect of the repeated ‘b’s is to convey her restrained tears and give a suggestion of tremulously spoken words— of repressing the need to cry, of blubbering.
“He thought how ‘Jack’, cold-footed, useless swine, / Had panicked”: it is interesting to note the recurrence of the name ‘Jack’ in Sassoon’s poems. Sassoon was known as ‘Mad Jack’ by his men because of his almost suicidal bravery in battle. To name the coward and object of contempt in this poem ‘Jack’, then, is an interesting turn. Perhaps this ‘Jack’ is a kind of alter-ego for Sassoon, as, in a sense, was ‘Mad Jack’; a guilty idea of another self against whom Sassoon opposed himself (as a poet-warrior, with some success).
“How he’d tried / To get sent home”: Jack has attempted to get a ‘Blighty’ wound— an injury that would get him sent home to ‘Blighty’, or Britain, in the slang of the time. This act of desperation— shooting oneself in the foot through sandbags, holding a hand above the parapet in a sniper zone, and so on— was not an uncommon recourse to those desperate to escape the Western front.
“…and how, at last, he died, / Blown to small bits.”: the grisly contrast of the soldier’s death to the heroism supposed in the poem’s title is clear. ‘Jack’ is “blown to bits” by a shell or a mine: the plosive sound, ‘b’ echoing the sound of the explosive and its effect on the unfortunate soldier. The halting rhythm of the line, with pauses following each stressed word (“how”, “last”, “died”), lends a sense of inevitability to Jack’s end.
“And no-one seemed to care / Except that lonely woman with the white hair.”: The final couplet is explicit, objective and powerful. The illusion of the opening stanza is replaced two related scenes of devastation: the fragmented body of the dead soldier, Jack, and the tragic image of the “lonely woman with the white hair”.
Wilfred Owen
1893–1918
Wilfred Owen, who wrote some of the best British poetry on World War I, composed nearly all of his poems in slightly over a year, from August 1917 to September 1918. In November 1918 he was killed in action at the age of 25, one week before the Armistice. Only five poems were published in his lifetime—three in the Nation and two that appeared anonymously in the Hydra, a journal he edited in 1917 when he was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. Shortly after his death, seven more of his poems appeared in the 1919 volume of Edith Sitwell's annual anthology, Wheels: a volume dedicated to his memory, and in 1919 and 1920 seven other poems appeared in periodicals. Almost all of Owen’s poems, therefore, appeared posthumously: importantly in the bestselling collection Poems (1920), edited by Siegfried Sassoon with the assistance of Edith Sitwell, contains 23 poems; The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1931), edited by Edmund Blunden, adds 19 poems to this number; and The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1963), edited by C. Day Lewis, contains 80 poems, adding some juvenilia, minor poems, and fragments but omitting a few of the poems from Blunden’s edition. Owen wrote vivid and terrifying poems about modern warfare, depicting graphic scenes with honest emotions; in doing so, young Owen helped to advance poetry into the Modernist era.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Dulce et Decorum Est" is a poem by the English poet Wilfred Owen. Like most of Owen's work, it was written between August 1917 and September 1918, while he was fighting in World War 1. Owen is known for his wrenching descriptions of suffering in war. In "Dulce et Decorum Est," he illustrates the brutal everyday struggle of a company of soldiers, focuses on the story of one soldier's agonizing death, and discusses the trauma that this event left behind. He uses a quotation from the Roman poet Horace to highlight the difference between the glorious image of war (spread by those not actually fighting in it) and war's horrifying reality.
Themes
The Horror and Trauma of War
Wilfred Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum Est” while he was fighting as a soldier during World War I. The poem graphically and bitterly describes the horrors of that war in particular, although it also implicitly speaks of the horror of all wars. While it is easy to comment on the “horror of war” in the abstract, the poem’s depiction of these horrors is devastating in its specificity, and also in the way that Owen makes clear that such horror permeates all aspects of war. The banal daily life of a soldier is excruciating, the brutal reality of death is unimaginable agony, and even surviving a war after watching others die invites a future of endless trauma. The way Owen uses language to put readers inside the experiences of a soldier helps them begin to understand the horrific experience of all of these awful aspects of war.
In the first stanza of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” the speaker thrusts the reader into the mundane drudgery and suffering of the wartime experience, as the speaker’s regiment walks from the front lines back to an undescribed place of “distant rest.” This is not a portrait of men driven by purpose or thrilled by battle. Instead, they are miserable: “coughing like hags,” cursing as they “trudge” through “sludge” with bloody feet. They march “asleep,” suggesting that these soldiers are like a kind of living dead. The terror and brutality of war have deadened them.
While the speaker is clear that the life of a soldier is painful and demoralizing, he demonstrates in the second stanza—which moves from describing the communal “we” of a regiment to a specific dying man—that death in war is also terrible: barbarous, agonizing, and meaningless. In the first two lines of the second stanza, the speaker captures the terror and dumb confusion of facing a gas attack (a feature of Word War I combat, which had never been used to such a terrible extent before that war), with the movement from the first cry of “Gas!” to the urgent amplification of that cry (“GAS!”), which is then followed by all the men “fumbling” with “clumsy helmets.” The speaker then describes a particular man unable to get his helmet on time, “stumbling” and “flound’ring” like a “man in fire” while the speaker can only watch helplessly from within his own mask. This other soldier's death is mired in confusion and pain. There isn’t even an enemy to face; it is a physically agonizing death offering no ideal or purpose to hold onto.
The poem’s very short third stanza suddenly plunges into the speaker’s own mind. In doing so, the poem reveals another aspect of the horror of war: that even surviving war offers ceaseless future torment. The surviving speaker describes himself as seeing in “all my dreams” this man dying in agony. The speaker can’t escape this vision, which means he can't ever achieve the "rest" that was the sole positive thing mentioned in the first stanza. The speaker's sleep is permanently haunted by the trauma of the death he has witnessed.
Since the third stanza is written in the present tense, it indicates that these dreams never fade. The speaker, who has survived—perhaps for a moment, perhaps the entire war—is permanently scarred by this trauma for however long his life will last. The poem’s portrayal of the horror of war, then, is complete and total. It reveals all aspects of war—living through it, dying in it, and surviving it—as being brutal, agonizing, and without meaning.
Wind up
War poetry, regardless of the era from which it originated, captures themes that carry across generations. It also seeks to create new language, which later generations use as a framework for understanding war history. For Decaul, poetry falls into two categories: visceral and meditative.
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