Siegfried Sassoon: Poems Essay Questions

What is the moral implication of the last stanza of “Suicide in the Trenches”?

The speaker in "Suicide in the Trenches" criticizes an ignorant public in the last stanza, which reads,

"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.”

The use of the second person is a direct address to those who blindly follow the patriotic narrative about honor and glory, as well as any reader who is ignorant of the true plight of soldiers. The implication is that the crowds should look past the superficial image of a glorified soldier. The speaker intends to shame these patriotic individuals with the lines "Sneak home and pray you'll never know / The hell where youth and laughter go." This final stanza addresses and dismantles the Bravery Versus Cowardice binary that characterized political propaganda during this time. This is a stance that appears in a great deal of Sassoon's war poems.

Describe the general progression of Sassoon's focus in his poetry.

Sassoon's early work can be characterized as Georgian verse: it is often described as sentimental, romantic, and concerned with the English landscape. Though this early work brought him little critical acclaim, it was the product of his peaceful existence in his childhood home before the war disrupted his life. This early practice helped Sassoon employ a musical ear, a penchant for using regular rhyme scheme and meter, and an ability to home in on details in his later work.

The war proved to be a turning point for Sassoon's development as a writer, and much to his later dismay, he is remembered first and foremost as a trench poet. Not only did his subject matter change, but Sassoon also employed different stylistic techniques. One example is colloquial language. Often, the soldiers in the war poems are given names, such as in "In the Pink." The speaker in "The Poet As Hero" declares, "I've said good-bye to Galahad," which indicates Sassoon's departure from the elevated and lofty language of his Georgian verse. First writing as an earnest soldier doing his duty (as expressed in "Absolution" ), an anti-war sentiment characterizes Sassoon's later war poems. This bitter tone can be seen in poems like "Base Details" and "Does It Matter?"

Though Sassoon continued to write about the war after it ended in 1918, he returned to the threads of nature writing that defined his early work. Most significantly in his later years, Sassoon's writing began to reflect his Catholic faith. One example is the collection Sequences, published in 1956, a year before his official conversion. Though these religious works received some attention, Sassoon is often anthologized as a war poet. In general, scholars consider his war poetry to be his most important.