Personal interpretation of Siegfried Sassoon's Repression of War Experience

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was born in Mattfield , Kent , in a house named Weirleigh. His father, Alfred Sassoon, was a Sephardic Jew and his mother, Theresa Thornycroft was a Protestant, which meant his father was disinherited by his wealthy merchant family for marrying a woman outside his faith. His mother belonged to the Thornycroft family, sculptors of many of the best known statues in London . This marriage broke when Siegfried was five years old, the reason may be his father contracted tuberculosis, which could be seen as a danger for all the family health. His father died four years after the divorced and Siegfried and his brothers were raised by their mother on her own.

(cf .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon)

(cf. http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/7-27-2006-103706.asp)

Sassoon attended classes at The New Beacon Preparatory School in Kent , at Malborough College in Wiltshire and at Clare College in Cambridge where he studied Law and History from 1905 to 1907. Nevertheless he did not get any university degree.

After his university experience he spent some years enjoying country life, fox-hunting, playing cricket and privately publishing a few volumes of poetry which were not highly acclaimed but which gave him some incomes to be able to live without working. His first success was The Daffodil Murderer , a parody of The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield published under the pseudonym of Saul Kain in 1913. He sent a copy of this work to Edmund Goose, who was so impressed by it that he sent a copy to Edward Marsh, the editor of the Georgian Poetry anthology at the time, and asked Sassoon to send copies of his other poems to Marsh. Marsh wrote to Sassoon and they became friends since then.

(cf .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon)

(cf. http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/)

Motivated by patriotism, Sassoon joined the British Army when the World War I became a real threat and was in service with the Sussex Yeomary on the day the United Kingdom declared war. He broke his arms in a riding accident and was not able to fight not even to leave England and spent the spring of 1915 convalescing from the accident. In May of that year, he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a commissioned officer, and in November, he was sent to First Battalion in France . In this same month his brother Hamo was killed in combat at Gallipoli, which really saddened Siegfried, who commemorated this loss writing the poem To my brother .

(cf .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon)

(cf. http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/)

In his service Sassoon met Robert Graves and they became close friends. They often read and discussed one another's work. Graves ' views profoundly affected Sassoon's concept of poetry. He soon became horrified by the realities of war and the tone in his writings changed completely. He tried to convey the horrors of war, the reality of the trenches and the sufferings the soldiers had to bear with. His new concept of reality had an effect on the movement towards Modernist poetry.

(cf. .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon)

On March, 1916 his friend David C. 'Tommy' Thomas, was killed, this together with the loss of his own brother and his vision of the horrors of war made Sassoon to become determined to get his revenge on the Germans and because of his almost suicidal behaviour at attacking the German lines hardly and restlessly he was nicknamed “Mad Jack” by his men. His achievements in battle made him earn a Military Cross.

Despite having been decorated for his bravery, he decided to make a stand against the conduct of the war in 1917. He threw his Military Cross into the river Mersey at the end of a convalescent period and declined to return to duty. Encouraged by pacifist friends, such as Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell, he sent a letter to his commanding officer titled A soldier's Declaration , which was sent to the press and read out in Parliament too. This declaration was a statement against the continuation of the war in which he expressed that the former objective of the war had changed and that that war had become a war of conquest and it was being deliberately prolonged by the authorities which had the power to stop it. His intention was to protest on behalf of the troops and to make the people staying in England aware of the reality and sufferings that involved a war like that. At writing this declaration Sassoon expected to face any punishment that could be derived of it. But his friend Robert Graves interceded on his behalf and convinced their commands that Siegfried suffered from Shell-shock, nowadays known as neurasthenia and Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh where he was treated by the psychiatrist, Dr. W. H. R. Rivers. At this hospital he met Wilfred Owen who got really impressed by Sassoon and took him as a kind of master and inspiration. Both men returned to active service in 1918, but Owen was killed in France and Sassoon, after spending some time in Palestine came back to the Front and was wounded again.

(cf .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon)

(cf. http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/)

(cf. http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/sassdefy.htm#top)

In 1918 Sassoon published The old Huntsman and other poems , a collection where he sang the nobility of war. And late that same year another collection of poems Counter-attack and other poems was published too but, in this case, his tone had radically changed. These poems are epigrammatic and satirical and they are aimed to those that are staying at home whom he considered to be making a profit out of the war or those whom he felt that were prolonging that war.

(cf. http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/)

(cf. http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/8103/)

The war put Sassoon in contact with people from lower social classes and he developed Socialist sympathies. In 1919 he took up a post as editor of the socialist Daily Herald, a British newspaper published in London from 1912. During this period at the newspaper he was responsible for employing eminent people as reviewers such as E.M. Forster and Charlotte Mew and commissioned materials from Arnold Bennett and Osbert Sitwell among others.

(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon)

Later Sassoon embarked on a lecture tour in the USA , as well as in a travel through Europe and Britain speaking at clubs and in schools and making friends.

In this period he started to live his homosexuality more openly and had an affair with the artist Gabriel Atkin, who had been introduced to him by mutual friends and on his travel to USA he met a young actor who treated him cruelly. But he was adored by female audiences too.

(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon)

In this time he started to write Memoirs of a Fox-hunting man , published in 1928. This work won that year the James Tait Black Award for fiction. Between 1928 and 1945 he spent most of his time writing his six volumes of autobiography. The first three volumes known as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, in which were included the previously mentioned Memoirs of a Fox-hunting man , Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936). These memoirs were a semi-fictional narration of Sassoon's life. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting man was published anonymously because he did not how to present himself as a prose writer to the reading public being known as a poet. The next three volumes of his autobiography were The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942) and Siegfried's Journey (1945).

(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon)

(cf. http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/)

In 1933 he married Hester Gatty and their son George was born in 1936. Their marriage ended in 1945. He did not serve during the Second World War and lived quietly in Wiltshire, where he died in 1967.

(cf. http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/)

Counter- Attack and other poems.

The collection Counter-attack and other poems was Publisher in May 1918. It contains thirty eight poems. These poems contained in the collection are aimed at those on the home front. The pomes were written to attack those at home whom he considered to be making a profit of the situation of war others, the soldiers for instance, were suffering or to those whom he thought that were prolonging the war.

(Cf. http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/)

(Cf. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Counter-Attack_and_Other_Poems)

The poems contained in this collection reveal the shocking brutality and situation of those fighting at the Front and the pointlessness of such a cruel experience as the war is.

(Cf. http://www.geocities.com/tinwings2002/index.htm)

Some of the poems coined in this collection were written at the Craiglockhart hospital where Sassoon stayed to recover from Shell-shock.

(Cf. http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/)

The poem I intend to analyse is part of this collection and his central theme is war although the treatment and vision of it is not a narration on any battle experience but an statement on the effects of the experience of fighting in war and the efforts to avoid becoming mad because of the experiences lived in battle.

REPRESSION OF WAR EXPERIENCE

NOW light the candles; one; two; there's a moth;
What silly beggars they are to blunder in
And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame—
No, no, not that,—it's bad to think of war,
When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you;
And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad
Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive them out to jabber among the trees.

Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand.
Draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen,
And you're as right as rain...
Why won't it rain?...
I wish there'd be a thunder-storm to-night,
With bucketsful of water to sluice the dark,
And make the roses hang their dripping heads.
Books; what a jolly company they are,
Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves,
Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green,
And every kind of colour. Which will you read?
Come on; O do read something; they're so wise.
I tell you all the wisdom of the world
Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet
You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out,
And listen to the silence: on the ceiling
There's one big, dizzy moth that bumps and flutters;
And in the breathless air outside the house
The garden waits for something that delays.
There must be crowds of ghosts among the trees,—
Not people killed in battle,—they're in France ,—
But horrible shapes in shrouds—old men who died
Slow, natural deaths,—old men with ugly souls,
Who wore their bodies out with nasty sins.

You're quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;
You'd never think there was a bloody war on!...
O yes, you would ... why, you can hear the guns.
Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft ... they never cease—
Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out
And screech at them to stop—I'm going crazy;
I'm going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

 

(Cf. http://www.bartleby.com/136/31.html)

Personal interpretation of Repression of War Experience

The poem I intend to interpret is, as I said in the previous section of this research part of the collection of poems Counter-Attack and other Poems.

In the first line of the poem the poet says to himself to turn the lights. It seems to me that the whole poem is an interior dialogue of the author. HE says there is a moth; this is the first allusion to a Nature's element. He expresses the idea that the moths are silly as they are constantly blundering in and burning her wings as they are attracted to the light, and in this case, the light is a candle. But he says that they burn their wings with glory, which is described as liquid flame. This last concept of being burned by glory and the idea of that they are silly, it seems to me that he is comparing moths with humans, as he gives them the ability to be silly something that has to do with being intelligent or, at least with having the possibility to be intelligent. And that idea of being burned by glory, being this glory brought by a repetitive situation that does not really bring anything positive but sorrow may be a simile of the moth's behaviour with the human behaviour in several situations, like a war situation may be. That is why in the next verse he says to himself not to think about war and that when someone has been trying to avoid thinking about something that scares him this thought comes back at night, when the tranquillity of the night involves everything.. In the next lines he starts speaking about soldiers, and this is the first reference to the fact of having been a soldier and having come back after having experienced such a horrible situation as war is. He says that soldiers don't go mad if they control their thoughts and avoid thinking and remembering war. If they do not do so they will go wandering and jabbering among the trees.

The second stanza is composed by three verses and it is a break between the first one which is composed by eight verses and the third one which contains twenty lines.

This second stanza, being a break in the poem is a message to him to stay calmed and stop thinking after drawing a deep breath, he says to himself to count fifteen and then he says that he is as right as rain. The use of the concept of rain here gives us the idea of being constant and thoughtless, being effective in his task, which is being quiet, without thinking about war.

The third stanza, composed as I said before by twenty verses starts desiring the rain to come. And the images that he composes by using natural events such as a thunder storm and roses hanging their dripping heads give us an idea of what is beauty for him. He wants rain to come and bring these events to him.

He starts speaking about books as a way to control war thoughts. He describes books as a jolly companion and he suggests reading books as a way to achieve wisdom and to escape from the hidden thoughts. The he describes a scene where the individual bites his nails and listens to the silence and observes a moth, again a moth bumping and fluttering, just like non desiderated thoughts play inside the mind.

Then he reckons about the outskirts of the house. And imagine that there must be crowds of ghosts among the trees; he even thinks that these ghosts are not people killed in battle but people naturally death, ugly souls emaciated by their sins.

In the final stanza, composed by seven lines, he talks about being quiet at home, in contrast with the situations lived in war. But although war is over and he is at home safe and quiet he cannot avoid thinking about it and hearing the sounds of the guns. He expresses how these sounds are impossible to be taken out from his head and how they are going to drive him mad despite all the efforts done to throw out of his mind the memories of war.


BIBlIOGRAPHY

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon

Article: Siegfried Sasoon

Home. http://en.wikipedia.org

-. http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/7-27-2006-103706.asp

Article: Siegfried Sassoon-war poet

Home: http://www.buzzle.com/

•  http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/

Article: Counter-Attack: Biography of Siegfried Sassoon by Michele Fry, 1998

Home: http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/sassoonsocy.htm#top

•  http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/sassdefy.htm#top

Article: Statement against the continuation of the war- !917

Home: http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/sassoonsocy.htm#top

•  http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/8103

Article: Siegfried Sassoon. War and other poems. By William J. Bean, 2001

•  http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Counter-Attack_and_Other_Poems

Article: Counter-Attack and other Poems

Home: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page

•  http://www.bartleby.com/136/31.html

Poem: Repression of War Experience

Home: http://www.bartleby.com/

 

Bibliographical note: All the webs used and cited have been visited several times during January and February of 2007.

The third, sixth and seventh sources cited above have been used on the first week of May 2007 .

 

  Academic year 2006/2007
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Mª Elena Mármol Rodríguez
memaro2@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press