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Siegfried Sassoon: A War Poet
Siegfried Sassoon was the scion of a wealthy British family who had a formal education at Marlborough College and Clare College, Cambridge where he read history. He was somewhat of a dilletente but was also a brilliant writer, publishing the well-recieved The Daffodil Murderer in 1913.
Just prior to the onset of the Great War Sassoon enlisted in the Sussex Yeomanry and although not required to serve outside of the country volunteered to enter one of the battalions being prepared for overseas deployment. Although delayed by injury from deployment, he was fit in time to be commissioned into the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in mid-1915, allowing him to deploy to the front with that unit's 1st Battalion.
At war Sassoon proved to be a competent and brave officer, and was well known for his almost suicidal actions at the front. During this time he became friends with another poet soldier, Robert Graves, and turned his poetry to trying to describe the conditions which he found at the front.
Sassoon would exemplify a generation of British gentlemen scholars, which included J.R.R Tolkien, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, Ralph Hale Mottram, and others who had grown up in rural Great Britian and had the money and liesure to pursue liberal studies. His poems were modernistic, in that they focused on the effects of war and not the grand sweep of history that would have been the lot of a romantic era. Like many of the mentioned authors he poems could be quite biting in their attempt to find meaning in the bloodshed they experienced.
Dreamers
Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.
I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.
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