WWI landscape in Siegfried Sassoon’s short poems
"France" and "Dream-Forest"
• Biography
Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in the
village of Matfield, Kent, to a Jewish father and a Protestant English mother. He was educated
at The New Beacon Preparatory
School, Kent, Marlborough College in
Wiltshire, and at
Clare College, Cambridge where he studied both law and history from 1905 to 1907. He
was poet, diarist and memoirist; he wrote poems, fictions and
biographies; his first real success was The Daffodil Murderer, a
parody of The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield, published in
1913 under the pseudonym of "Saul Kain". His works were influenced by poets such
as: Wilfred Owen,
Edmund Blunden and
Robert Graves.
(cf. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon>)
Sassoon, motivated by patriotism, joined the
military just as the threat of World War I was realised, and was in
service with the Sussex Yeomanry on the day the United Kingdom declared
war. He soon became horrified by the realities of war, and the tone of
his writing changed completely: where his early poems dealt with a
Romantic dilettantish sweetness, his war poetry changes into an
increasingly discordant music, intended to convey the ugly truths of the
trenches to an audience until now lulled by patriotic propaganda.
Despite having been decorated for bravery, he decided, in 1917, to make
a stand against the conduct of the war. One of the reasons for his
violent anti-war feeling was the death of his friend, David Cuthbert
Thomas.
(cf. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon>)
•Introduction of the two poems
These two short poems belong to "The Old Huntsman and Other Poems" in
the section "War poems" (1915-1918); "The Old Huntsman" appeared in
early 1918 singing the nobility of war. These two poems deal with war
landscapes, and in my opinion the first one is during a battle and the
second one is after a battle, so we can see the different perceptions
that a man or a soldier can have.
• Poem France
SHE triumphs, in the vivid green
Where sun and quivering
foliage meet;
And in each soldier’s heart serene;
When
death stood near them they have seen
The radiant forests
where her
feet
5
Move on a breeze of silver sheen.
And they are fortunate, who fight
For gleaming landscapes
swept and shafted
And crowned by
cloud pavilions white;
Hearing such harmonies as
might
10
Only from Heaven be downward wafted—
Voices of victory
and delight.
(cf. < http://www.bartleby.com/135/5.html>)
• Analysis of the poem
This short poem is composed of octameter verses, and of two sestet
stanzas. The rhyme scheme is the following ABCABC and DEDDED. The theme
of this poem is clearly the War, seen through the beauty and the
brightness of nature and of the landscape, which surrounds the soldiers.
The War, personified by the pronoun "she", triumphs and wins in the
landscape, and although the soldiers are near death, they are comforted
by the "radiant forests", they are surrounded by white and gleaming
nature, by the harmony of the landscape, while they fight in order to
win. There is not a pessimistic or sad tone, instead there are "voices
of victory and delight".
In this poem, we can notice a similar
use of nature as one by the romantic poets, nature as a means of escape
from the brutality of society, here it is the escape from the horror of
the war. although the death and fighting, they are comforted by the
"gleaming landscapes and crowned by cloud pavilions white". The poet
seems to use nature to decrease the cruelty of War and to presenta less
pessimistic vision of the war, using metaphors of a beautiful nature to
give the soldiers a sense of peace and heavenly state.
Moreover,
the numerous verbs of movement in this poem such as, quivering, swept,
shafted, wafted, associated with the nature and the soldiers, give us an
idea of difference between thedisorder of the war and the harmony of the
nature; whereas the nature is harmonious, the war is associated with
dynamic verbs, indicating the fight and the death, which, finally, take
them to heaven.
(cf. personal opinion)
• Poem Dream-Forest
WHERE sunshine flecks the green,
Through towering woods my way
Goes winding all the day.
Scant are the flowers that bloom
Beneath the bosky screen
5
And cage of golden gloom.
Few are the birds that call,
Shrill-voiced and seldom seen.
Where silence masters all,
And
light my footsteps fall,
10
The whispering runnels only
With blazing noon confer;
And comes no breeze to stir
The tangled thickets lonely.
(cf.< http://www.bartleby.com/135/55.html>)
• Analysis of the poem
This poem is composed of three stanzas, one tercet, one distic plus
one tercet and a final sestet; the rhyme scheme is ABB CACDA DDBEFB.
To my mind the theme is ambiguous, because at a first sight I would
believe that it deals with war, clearly because it belongs to the war
poems, but war is not mentioned, so I can conclude that the situation is
an after-battle and there are expressed feelings and emotion of a
soldier after a fight. There are words referring to silence and
loneliness as "silence" and "lonely", negative words as: winding, scant,
cage, gloom, blazing and so on; it seems to me that emotions and
feelings are seen in a distorted way, because of the cruelty of the war,
consequently nature is not a wonderful place, "Scant are the flowers
that bloom", "cage of golden gloom", "Few are the birds", "silence
masters all" and "comes no breeze to stir//The tangled thickets lonely".
Only the colours of this landscape does not appear in a negative
connotation "green", "golden", "light", "sunshine".
I think that the tone is hard-won, that is to say the poet is
absorbed in a war situation that is cruel and bloody, so his thoughts
are pervaded by anguish and destruction, and although nature is a
beautiful place, man mind is corrupted by the war and neither the
landscape can comfort him.
On the whole, the text expresses the grief and devastation that cause
to him and to nature, the emptiness that war left.
(cf. personal opinion)
•Conclusion
In my view, these two short poems reflect two different moments of
the war and two different views of the relation with nature and, of
course, of the war. While the poem France describes the moment of the
battle, the second one describes the moment afterwards the fight.
I quote some sentences of poet’s diary extracts: "But the men who
write these manifestos do not truly know what useless suffering the war
inflicts.." and "The soldiers who return home seem stunned by the things
they have endured..."
(cf.http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/tutorials/intro/sassoon/diary.html)
These two sentences reflect the poet’s opinion about the war and its
consequences, stressing the pain and how war is nonsense and how much
changes soldiers’ life, this grief could be found in the two poems, but
the difference consists in the two vision of the landscape; in the poem
France, the landscape surrounds the soldier and they are near death, but
it comforts them and tries to bring them to heaven. Whereas in the
second poem "Dream-forest", landscape does not comfort the soldier who
wonders in the forest, which has been stricken by the effects of the
war.
(cf. personal opinion)
Bibliography:
-Sassoon’s biography under Wikipedia homepage
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon>
Home:
www.wikipedia.org 23/03/2007
-Sassoon’s "France" under Bartleby homepage, section
verse
<http://www.bartleby.com/135/5.html>
Home:
www.bartleby.com 25/03/2007
-Sassoon’s "Dream-Forest" under Bartleby homepage section
verse
<http://www.bartleby.com/135/55.html>
Home:
www.bartleby.com 07/05/2007
-Sassoon’s diary extracts
<http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/tutorials/intro/sassoon/diary.html>
Home:
www.oucs.ox.ac.uk
08/05/2007