Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon (September 8, 1886 - September 1, 1967) was a British poet, best known for the poems he wrote as a soldier in World War I.
Sourced
A Soldier's Declaration (July 1917)
- I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.
- I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.
The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
- Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
- Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
- "Dreamers"
- Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
- They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.
- "Dreamers"
- You smug-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.
- "Suicide in the Trenches"
Collected Poems (1949)
- Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
- The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
- Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, —
- Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
- Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
- Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
- Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
- The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
- Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride
- 'Their name liveth for evermore' the Gateway claims.
- Was ever an immolation so belied
- As these intolerably nameless names?
- Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
- Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
- "On Passing the New Menin Gate" (1927-1928)
W. H. R. Rivers
Sassoon wrote at least two poems about W. H. R. Rivers.
Revisitation
(W.H.R.R)
- What voice revisits me this night? What face
- To my heart’s room returns?
- From the perpetual silence where the grace
- Of human sainthood burns
- Hastes he once more to harmonise and heal?
- I know not. Only I feel
- His influence undiminished
- And his life’s work, in me and many, unfinished.
- O fathering friend and scientist of good,
- Who in solitude, one bygone summer’s day,
- And in the throes of bodily anguish, passed away
- From dream and conflict and research-lit lands
- Of ethnological learning, - even as you stood
- Selfless and ardent, resolute and gay,
- So in this hour, in strange survival stands
- Your ghost, whom I am powerless to repay.
- Lines omitted from final version of Revisitation
- Deep in my morning time he made his mark
- And still he comes uncalled to be my guide
- In devastated regions
- When the brain has lost its bearings in the dark
- And broken in it’s body’s pride
- In the long campaign to which it had sworn allegiance
