PAPER
VII
Suicide in the trenches, Siegfried Loraine
Sassoon, from ‘Counter-Attack and other Poems’, 1918.
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, 5
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, 10
Sneak
home and pray you'll never know
The
hell where youth and laughter go.
S. Sassoon
http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-suicide.html
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (1886-1967) was one of the greatest poets during the
I World War period. And I have particularly found this poem, Suicide in the Trenches, as the poem
that summarizes best his life and his inner most feelings.
Through these three paragraphs,
Sassoon explains the suicide of a young boy, who had a happy life before the
war and who had to confront the horrors of this hell. He could not manage to
face all those terrible situations and he decided to end his life. But besides
all this cruel history, Sassoon’s poetry main objective is stated in the last
paragraph. Here he blames the crowds, addressing them as You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye (line 9). In that poem he
accuses them of cheering the soldiers when they were marching by to the war,
and he claims that he hopes that the crowd never knows the atrocities of the
war. But we have to read between the lines during this last paragraph. What
Sassoon wants to communicate to the audience is his anger against all the
people who were supporting the war and did not do anything to stop it.
He has done an excellent work in
this poem, which he has divided into three parts. In the first one he uses
words such as: boy, joy, grin, and lark, all of them related to happiness.
Therefore, he builds an image of youth and joy in the reader’s mind, and only
one paragraph later he visualizes a terrible image of the war, with words such
as: trenches, cowed, glum, crumps, lice and bullet. Through this device, the
poet achieves an even greater effect on the audience. While reading the poem,
the reader is overwhelmed by the contrast of these quite different images, one
representing life and felicity, and the other just death; the war. Following
these two parts, he exposes his attack to the passive beholders of the war. Several poems, particularly those in
Counter-Attack and Other Poems are aimed at those on the ‘Home Front’.
Sassoon used his poems to hit out at those at Home whom he considered to be
making a profit out of the War, or those whom he felt were helping to prolong
the War.[1]
The war was hard on Siegfried and his family. He enlisted the 2nd of August of 1914, and he
witnessed the cruelty of the war since the first moment. Early in the war Sassoon's youngest
brother was killed. He took revenge for his brother's death by involving
himself in brave, sometimes suicidal deeds against the Germans, and for these
actions he received some awards. After that, a short period apart from the
front helped to calm him and later as the war dragged on, he experienced a
sense of total disgust with the conflict.[2] Another strong reason for his anti-war
feeling was the death of a friend of his, David Cuthbert Thomas, who died some months after his brother, and who some critics claim to be
Sassoon’s homosexual partner.[3]
Always involved by this kind of terrible circumstances, Sassoon was moved
around some fronts on different parts of Europe, and he was sent several times
to hospitals, sometimes because of mental illnesses, as consequence of the
strong and severe experiences at the front.
We do not know whether the story
that the poet tells in Suicide in the
Stretches is true or not. He probably saw a young man committing suicide in
the trench or he probably did not. But this is not the main aspect of this
poem. Through that kind of poems Siegfried Sassoon tries to transmit, to
communicate the horror of the war, the horror of a war that he desired to
finish and nobody did anything to end. Because after a period away from the front,
he changed his mind, he decided he had seen enough sorrow. And when he came
back to the war, he did everything he could in order to bring the peace. He
wrote letters to the authorities and as a response they sent him further to the
front. Because of this early Sassoon war poetry speaks about the war as a noble
thing, while later war poetry attacks the war and the people who made profit of
it, as this poem, from Counter-Attack and
other Poems (1918).
It is important to mention that during his time at the front he became
friend of poets such as Wilfred Owen or Robert Graves, and later he met also
Thomas Hardy and T.H Lawrence. They all helped each other. And because of being
acquaintance with popular people, but most of all because of the reality and
truth of his poems, Siegfried Sassoon is regarded as one of the I World War
poets.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-suicide.html,‘Contents. Sassoon, Siegfried,
Counter-Attack and other Poems,1918’, Bartleby.com, 2005, (05-04-06).
http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/, ‘Counter-Attack’, Michèle Fry,
1998, (04-05-06).
http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/8103/,
‘Sassoon, Siegfried. War and other poems’, William J. Bean, 2001, (05-04-06).
http://www.firstworldwar.com/poetsandprose/sassoon.htm,
‘First World War.com-Prose & Poetry- S. Sassoon’, Michael Duffy, 2000-2006,
(05-04-06).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon#Biography,
‘Siegfried Sassoon- Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia’, board@wikipedia.org, 2006, (05-04-06).
[1] ‘Counter-Attack’, Michèle Fry.
[2] ‘Sassoon, Siegfried. War and other
poems’, William J. Bean.
[3] ‘Siegfried Sassoon-Wikipedia’, board@wikipedia.org.