Siegfried Sassoon and the Brutality of War in His Poetry

Siegfried Sassoon: poet of war

Siegfried Sassoon in 1886 and he become one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry described the horror and brutality of trench, human feelings and emotions, the futility of the war and its blind cruelty. He expressed the inhumanity of war in his poems as a senseless butchery. Sassoon was soon selected to be an officer and, at war, he was wounded twice and also contracted a fever. He recovered from the gunshot wound but the war’s mental damage lasted because nightmares and memories was hard t shake off.

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,

With cramps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

You snug-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 poem "Suicide in the trenches"

Suicide in the trenches is a poem written in 1917 by Sassoon. This poem talks about a young soldier, whose smile was joyless because of the war. He expressed his youth during the morning and we understand it through whistling without any fear. He spends his days in the trenches full of mice, weapons, lice and mud. Trenches was a war ditch for defense, where the soldiers stood and fought. The phrase “No one spoke of him again” represents an unknown soldier because war causes many deaths and so the soldiers are forgotten. Death was seen as the only way to escape preferable to the hell of war. In the last stanza, Sassoon is accusing the crowd that don’t really understand what war and pain is because people celebrate the march of soldiers and doesn’t know in that hell ends up youth and hope.