Patricia Valle Elegido

GLORY OF WOMEN

You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.
You can't believe that British troops 'retire'
When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses - blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

http://www.bartleby.com/136/18.html, visited March 31, 2006

Siegfried Sassoon

“More than any other conflict, the Great War inspired writers of all generations and classes, most notably among combatants.” (First World War, prose & poetry). And that was what happened in the case of Siegfried Sassoon, he was a combatant who decided after his experience to write about (or against) war, in some poems creating sometimes really awful pictures.

Following a definition given by Wordsworth, ‘poetry’ is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, and there can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war: hope and fear; exhilaration and humiliation; hatred (not only for the enemy, but also for generals, politicians, and war-profiteers); love (for fellow soldiers, for women and children left behind, for country (often) and cause (occasionally)). (oucs.ox.ac.uk, intro)

“In the poems of Sassoon we see the voice of the individual: at times cynical, at times sympathetic. Yet running through all the poems is a feeling of futility and outrage at the suffering caused by the War of the War itself.” (oucs.ox.ac.uk, history) But instead of what he tells us in each poem, he was considered “the most innocent of the War poets” (oucs.ox.ac.uk, Sassoon)

What I’m going to analyze is the poem titled “Glory of Women”, where the author seems that he is going to glorify the female genre in general or in particular. But, as we will see, that appearance is far from its real meaning.

“In his brief, direct, and powerful poem, Sassoon presents and laments this veil of ignorance, beneath which the English women still live, and from he and his fellow soldiers have been torn.” (harverford, Sasslehr)

The first sign of criticism is in verses 3 and 4: “You worship decorations; you believe that chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.” Women used to live in a dream, and all the injuries suffered by soldiers were as symbols of honor and love for the country. And that is what Sassoon is criticising since “the war itself is, for Sassoon, a monstrous atrocity, and the simple act of memorization through medals, honours, and manipulated stories of glory cannot counterbalance the horrific reality of the soldiers’ situation.” (Haverford, Sasslehr)

In verse 5 we can see a short but peculiar sentence: “You make us shells.” We can interpret it in two senses: in a literal sense, women were physically implied in the construction of shell ammunition during the War period; and in the other sense, “the deification which the men received at the ideology of women made them nothing more than shell structures.” (Harverford, Lehrcom1). That means that the basic characteristic trait of women in that time was ‘superficiality’. “Sassoon depicts these soldiers’ sweethearts in the workforce as capricious hypocrites with misguided ideation about the heroics of war.” (Harverford, Sasskanay)

What is important in this poem is not the horror of the battle itself, what the author is highlighting here is the role carried out by women. They lived the War ignoring the real horror of the battle and worrying just about the honour and patriotism of soldiers. In this poem, Sassoon is not telling us a story about the war, he is now making a commentary contrasting the role of men and women. In the last three verses, the author is creating a picture which make us see that contrast between the soldier (the general role of soldiers) and his mother (the general role of women): “O German mother dreaming by the fire, while you are knitting socks to send your son, his face is trodden deeper in the mud.”

“There is further irony within the aforementioned last three lines. These lines leave the reader with the final image of a devoted, German soldier's mother knitting by a fire. This image is a stark juxtaposition from the image of the British women in a factory making the shells that are killing the German soldiers. This juxtaposition leads to the final and most potent irony of one woman's power to create another woman's grief, the latter of which would prefer her soldier to be without decorations than to have "his face trodden deeper in mud". (Harverford, Sasskanay) So, following Sassoon's view, this is the ‘glory of women’.

Unfortunately, poetry is used here to describe one of the worst things that human beings can do to another: the “legal” murder called WAR. Usually writers about First World War should express themselves though writing to condemn the brutality and the misery of being a soldier. Against all wishes of patriotism or “love for the country”, the violence against humanity provoked by the same humanity exceed all those “positive” traits applied to War, and makes it one of the worst fears which people hide deeply in their hearts.

This is a poem against all those thoughts about the honor and glory applied to soldiers, and the way to condemn those thoughts is applying them to who are ignoring all those miseries about war: women. That is why Sassoon named ironically the poem “Glory of women”, to say that their thoughts of glory and honor about their soldiers, makes them “glorious”, which really means the contrary.

I have chosen this poem because of its ironical way of telling the truth. Sassoon, following his own pattern, is attacking the entire nature of war and those who profit by it, but in this way he is using two messages. The literal message, which can be understandable by who believe in that “glory of women”, and the hidden message, which tells us the cruel reality of those people who ignore and want not to see the real world that they are living.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967). “Counter-Attack and Other Poems” (1918).

“Glory of Women”

http://www.bartleby.com/136/18.html, visited March 31, 2006

Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/136/. [Date of Printout].

First published January 1996; published July 1999 by Bartleby.com;

First World War_com- Prose & Poetry

http://www.firstworldwar.com/poetsandprose/index.html, visited March 31, 2006

SafeSurf Rated

Introduction to First World War Poetry

- Seminar Introduction

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/tutorials/intro/intro.html, visited March 31, 2006