Siegfried Sassoon: Poems Literary Elements

Many speakers in Sassoon's war poems are unidentified third-person observers or narrators that employ an angry, bitter, and/or compassionate tone. At times, the speakers share attributes with Sassoon himself: particularly concerning his feelings about the war, which shifted over time from a patriotic sense of duty to disillusionment.

Many of Sassoon's poems are written in iambic pentameter and employ a regular rhyme pattern; if these qualities are disrupted in Sassoon's poems, there is often a meaningful purpose to the disrupted form. Sassoon also has demonstrated a preference for sonnets.

Sassoon often relies on figurative language to develop his images of nature and of war. For example, a "golden wind" is a metaphor for time in "Absolution."

As a poet who learned to write by setting verse to music, Sassoon was concerned with the sonic flow of his poems and regularly employed alliteration and assonance in his work. "Base Details" is a prime example of this: the major has a "puffy petulant face" as he sits about, "guzzling and gulping" food and drink.

Irony plays an important role in Sassoon's war poems. He often places the conditions of soldiers in direct opposition to the lives led by commanding officers, showing the irony of the military hierarchy: those who have the power to send soldiers to their deaths do not have to suffer.

War Poetry, Elegy, Georgian Verse, Religious Verse

The settings of the poems include England, the Western Front of World War I, military hospitals, and the homes of the soldiers who came back after getting wounded.

Sarcastic, angry, compassionate.

The soldiers are often presented as protagonists while the officials who command them are depicted as antagonists.

Sassoon's pre-war Georgian poetry is often criticized for not having any conflict at all.

The major conflict in the war poems is that the propaganda-fueled false narrative that the war only connotes glory and honor does not actually acknowledge the real experiences of soldiers. Another conflict is between soldiers and their commanding officials, or between soldiers and anyone who blindly supports the war effort.

After the war, Sassoon struggled to reorient himself and the focus of his writing. Though he continued to write about the war, he also returned to nature poetry and began expressing his faith through verse.

The climax in Sassoon's war poetry often comes toward the end of the poems, after the tension has been sufficiently built up.

Allusions to Christ, war, death, prayer, and darkness have been used in Sassoon's poems.

In "The Rear-Guard," the phrase "fists of fingers" is a synecdoche that evokes many parts of a whole, and could refer to the sheer amount of soldiers who died as a result of the war (Line 18). In the poem "Attack," "Men" is a metonym for the soldiers.

Death and war are often personified in the poems. For example, death plays an active role in "The Death-Bed" as a figure who departs with a wounded soldier.