CLOSE READING: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.’

How form impacts persona and message in the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen

Photo by Elina Sazonova

Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen — the names of these two poets evoke, instantaneously, thoughts of the artistic heart that was moulded in the steel storm of the First World War, and, in the case of Owen, outlasted its creator’s experience of it. Owen and Sassoon had a well-known friendship, with Owen very much seeing Sassoon as a mentor. Yet although united in their experience of human-wrought horror and their creative outlet of poetry, they each had distinct approaches to using it as a means to process their experiences, particularly as pertains the way they utilised form. This analysis primarily focuses on Sassoon’s ‘The Hero’ and Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, but will also include discussion of Sassoon’s ‘The Dug Out’ as well as Owen’s ‘The Send-Off’ to formulate a more nuanced take on each poet’s use of form and how, through rhyme, metre, pronouns, and diction, the poets either close or widen the narrative distance. Through this it will become clear that form integrally serves the poetry of both poets, either through the persona in the interest of persuasion through emotional connection, pertinent to the waning Victorian tradition and used more by Sassoon, or through precise imagery and language in the interest of dissuasion through generating feelings of unease, pertinent to the emerging Modernist tradition and used more by Owen.

Sassoon’s ‘The Hero’ is a poem hinging on the conflict between the front lines and the home front, espoused in the characters of the mother, the Brother Officer, and ‘Jack’. This conflict is built in to and exacerbated by the poem’s form, emphasising the disconnect between the persona the reader enters this poem through — Brother Officer — and the other figures. The poem itself is in iambic pentameter, lending cohesion and lyricism to this piece and situating Sassoon’s style closer to that of the preceding Victorians — yet his subject matter and execution demonstrates the beginning of the shift away from this tradition. Sentiment does not become sentimentality, and indirectness is a narrative tool to but delay the revelation of truth — this truth being Jack’s fate — by poem’s end, rather than to obfuscate meaning with discursiveness. His language is clear and precise, and deployed well by the form.

The rhyme scheme Sassoon employs plays into the aforementioned conflict in several ways. Within the structure itself, the first stanza and third stanza both utilise an AABBCC rhyme scheme — the heroic couplet. This suits the narrative nature of the poem while also representing an ironic aspect, given its title and focus on heroism as conceptualised and then destroyed by the reality of the First World War. The first stanza pertains to the mother, and each ending word within each rhyming couplet is a contrast. Lines 1 and 2 end with ‘said’ and ‘read’, two differing actions, speech and silence; 3 and 4 end with ‘broke’ and ‘choke’, a thing falling apart and a thing being squeezed together; and lines 5 and 6 end with ‘proud’ and ‘bowed’, the action contrasting with the connotations of the purported feeling (Rattiner and Samoy, 2018, p.28). The second stanza employs similar contrasts, such as ‘tried’ and ‘died’ in lines 15–16, emphasising the futility of ‘Jack’’s actions (Rattiner and Samoy, 2018, p.28). Rhyme both forces and acts as an apt frame upon which to hang particular diction — single syllable words of contrasting meaning — that on a line-by-line, purely form-based level, build the subject of contrast and juxtaposition into the very fabric of the poem itself. This emotive use of language woven into form rapidly closes the narrative distance by emotionally involving the reader from the outset.

This is reinforced as those stanzas also thereby coincide with a focus beyond the persona of the Brother Officer, bookending the middle stanza in which the Brother Officer reflects on his discussion with the mother. The Brother Officer is the lens through which we experience the mother’s grief, and through which we understand his own bitter outlook on war. Our perceptions of her are filtered through his. This stanza alone employs DEDEFF, the alternating rhymes and concluding couplet reminiscent of the closing sestet of a sonnet. Given that sonnets usually examine a particular turn or conflicting ideas, it is appropriately used and aptly placed as a bridge between the two stanzas featuring heroic couplets. The diction reinforces this concept — the pity of ‘poor old dear’ and the somewhat oxymoronic phrase ‘gallant lies’ in line 8, for example, pave the way for the sardonic bitterness of stanza 3 (Rattiner and Samoy, 2018, p.28). Here, form makes clear the marker between experiencing the recounted conversation with the mother, living in the Brother Officer’s headspace, and then traveling in that headspace back towards another recount, of ‘Jack’ and his futile death.

Sassoon makes apt and moving use of inverted commas, both in terms of denoting dialogue and with regards to a name, to signify the disjointedness between the ideas and identities of the home front as well as the front lines, and the reality of the people going through the two experiences of war. This is particularly clear in stanza one, where dialogue commences every other line, beginning with the first at its very start, ‘“Jack fell as he’d have wished”, the mother said’ (Rattiner and Samoy, 2018, p.28). This dialogue plays a dual role. First, it further closes the already greatly reduced narrative distance as the poem’s narrative opens with the reader being spoken to as if directly, at the same time and in the shoes of the Brother Officer. It also pulls double duty, as the dialogue deliberately contrasts with the mother’s body language, where specific verbs and adjectives — ‘folded’, ‘tired’, ‘quavered’ — are in opposition to her stated pride and her gratitude to the colonel in line 3 (Rattiner and Samoy, 2018, p.28).

Finally, there is the case of ‘Jack’ in line 13. ‘Jack’ is a character whose name exists in quotation marks only, both in dialogue and in the Brother Officer’s internal monologue. This particular choice can be interpreted as playing to the universality of the front line experience — where ‘Jack’ may be replaced with Bill, or Charlie, or any other soldier’s name or nickname. However, it can just as easily be taken to mean something darker and more alienating — the concept that the name of ‘Jack’, this identity known and clung to by the mother and the soldier himself before the war, is now something that the war has destroyed, has made questionable, has turned into inference or memory. ‘Jack’ was no more than cannon fodder, and the Brother Officer understands this. In putting a qualification on ‘Jack’, Sassoon calls into question the existence of the doomed soldier’s individual identity entirely, and thus with one structural choice provides a damning judgment on what war does to an individual soul.

Where Sassoon pulls upon emotional strings, Owen draws on evocation of an internal and external landscape, and how the two feed off one another to draw down the sense of doom pervasive on the way to and upon the battlefield. Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” is a poem that aptly uses form to create the sense of distance and clarity pertinent to the shifting poetic scene from Victorian to Modernist alongside spins on old poetic forms, redeploying them in service of the poem’s ends — in this case, to demonstrate the desolation of warfare upon youth and the pity of those who observe them. As he himself said: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity’ (in Trott, 2018).

‘Anthem’ is, in many ways, a warped kind of sonnet, seemingly taking this traditional form and distorting it in several notable structural ways. The title itself, ‘Anthem’, indicates a sonic quality, a sense of pace in the verse meant to represent and champion a particular idea — in this case, not a triumphant one. The first stanza of 8 lines employs an ABABCDCD rhyme scheme — typical of a sonnet — then employs an atypical line break. The sestet suddenly changes the rhyme scheme to be reminiscent of the Italian sonnet, becoming EFFEGG. The effect of this disjointedness provokes a sensation of calling for a half-remembered song or rhythm, seeking out a sense of normalcy, and mixing them up in the effort, eerily calling to mind the closing line of Owen’s poem ‘The Send-Off’ (discussed in further detail below), which ends with the phrase ‘half-known roads’ (Blackthorn Press, 2013, p.13). This means the poem’s rhythm bears a familiarity to the ear and yet has clearly become something utterly changed. The resonance of this ruptured musicality in the context of the poem’s actual content, lamenting the lack of any true sound or action that can properly lament the youth that are dead and doomed to die in war, runs deep into the poem’s framework.

The use of indentation supports this by adding yet another layer of disjointedness. In lines 1–4, the indents are on lines 2 and 3, and thus against the grain of the ABAB rhyme scheme. Yet in the next four lines, the indents comply with the rhyme scheme, appearing on lines 6 and 8. A similar shift occurs in lines 9–12, which invert the rhyme scheme — becoming, as mentioned, EFFEGG, but maintaining the same indentation on every other line, save the closing couplet. Here, the visual aspect of the poem reinforces the jarring inconsistency of the anthem, unsettling any sense of regularity a reader may expect to be lulled into.

The words of the poem therefore have a perfect frame of form upon which to hang and reinforce this meaning, this sense of jarring distortion, encroaching doom, and detached sorrow. ‘Anthem’ is filled with fierce diction and uncompromising consonance in the first stanza. Line 3 in particular, ‘Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’, encapsulates this, also employing alliteration and anaphora with its repetition of the previous line’s ‘Only’, hammering down the strength of the sonic discord (Blackthorn Press, 2013, p.12). This line especially is aided by the combination of the indentation element — the anaphora is emphasised by the two lines, each successive, being indented even though this does not necessarily jive with the rhyme scheme.

In these ways, the rhyme scheme and the visual structure of the individual lines act as a hanger for the precise language. There is no clear persona, but that does not appear to be Owen’s intent. Unlike Sassoon, we are not entering someone’s headspace in this poem. Owen seeks to capture specific imagery of war and intersperse it with imagery of the home front, drawing the two together with clarity and yet as though from a tertiary observer. Combined, these elements serve to distance the reader from the persona but embed in them a pervasive sense of dread and unease about the fight that has been fought, is being fought, and will be fought — and end in futility.

If we observe these two poems with a preliminary comparison, it becomes clear that both poets have drawn upon existing, well-entrenched forms of verse — namely the sonnet and heroic couplet — and have reflected on it or challenged it in their work. In Sassoon’s case, the former is truer. He has taken a traditional form and redeployed it with his own particular use of clear diction to close the narrative distance, firmly entrenching a sense of identity to the speaker and a sense of emotional investment for the reader. Owen more radically alters the sonnet structure as a way of stretching the bounds of it, something that would become a hallmark of some later Modernist schools of poetry. Owen both fulfills and subverts the expectations of this poetic form in order to reinforce the intention of his work. One can extrapolate, given their relationship, that Owen was influenced by Sassoon’s use of classical forms, and extended this through subversion. Where both poets come together — yet also, again, drift apart, in this case through personal artistic choice — is in their unique use of visual and grammatical minutiae to reinforce or change meaning. In Owen’s case this is in the indentations that emphasise his anaphora and subverted rhyme schemes. In Sassoon’s case, it is in his use of dialogue tags and quotation marks that alter meaning.

If we turn discussion to two further poems by Sassoon and Owen — ‘The Dug-Out’ and ‘The Send-Off’ respectively — we can continue to observe additional ways in which they have manipulated form for the sake of meaning. In Sassoon’s case, it is often more subtle than Owen’s, a frame through which to explore other elements that enhance meaning, where Owen’s use of form has the sense of being far more integral to how he deploys other sonic and visual elements to evoke pity.

‘The Dug-Out’ is a poem where we can clearly see Sassoon’s employment of the persona in creating meaning even more clearly than in ‘The Hero’, and where form plays a more background role that nevertheless impacts the rhythm of the poem, bringing the reader into the pace of the persona’s thoughts. The first and most striking aspect of form is Sassoon’s use of pronouns. From the first instance, the persona speaks in first person, as opposed to third person as in ‘The Hero’. More than that, however, the first person poet addresses someone with second person pronouns, asking, ‘Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled[?]’ (Rattiner and Samoy, 2018, p.92). This radically and rapidly closes the narrative distance by pulling the reader directly into the trenches — spoken to, plead with, the reader may more easily see themselves reflected in both the soldier the narrator is speaking to, and the narrator himself. There is intimacy in the use of the second person, fostering the emotional connection previously noted to have been heavily employed by Sassoon. The first person on the part of the narrator carries on through the poem, as well. In saying ‘It hurts my heart’ after the initial plea (Rattiner and Samoy, 2018, p.92), it is a moment of self-reflection, connecting the reader not just to the persona’s inner monologue, but to his own body, mind, feelings, and memories. There is no distance from the very real impact of this scenario and this war.

In terms of the poem’s structure itself, this aspect features a break from convention that differs from ‘The Hero’, pulling Sassoon forward into the early Modernist tradition as well. Only every other line rhymes, creating a sense of cohesion but with a greater sense of freedom, too, erring perhaps closer to the free-verse-centric Imagiste tradition embraced by other contemporaries who also wrote war poetry, such as T.E. Hulme. This is also represented by the scansion, which is not quite iambic pentameter, yet echoes with the ghost of the metre. Any sense of regimented metre is broken by uneven syllables, ellipses as in line 6, semicolons as in line 7, and run on sentences, such as lines 2–3, ‘And one arm bent across your sullen, cold,/Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,’ (Rattiner and Samoy, 2018, p.92). Through this Sassoon creates a sense of movement while deliberately removing the opportunity for cohesive, even metre. The poem reads with the smoothness of thought or spoken words, the punctuation creating the rhythm of breath, of pauses and thoughts, with the uneven nature further reinforcing the persona’s dread, their quiet distress at the state of their comrade.

Finally, Sassoon’s diction must be noted, as served by the form in its intent to inform us of the persona’s state of mind. Sassoon employs highly evocative adjectives, nouns, and verbs that find their place in the unique rhyme scheme to drive home his message. Words like ‘sullen’, ‘cold’, ‘exhausted’, and ‘guttering’ all reinforce an idea of waning, of being worn away and descending into tiredness, as do verbs like ‘mumble’ and ‘sigh’ (Rattiner and Samoy, 2018, p.92)v- but these are clearly still words in the world of the living. The reader is left as concerned as the persona, drawn into the sense that something is wrong with the second person although these words still bear a semblance of normalcy. As in ‘The Hero’, Sassoon saves the revelation of the conflict, of the wrongness, for the end, and emphasises it through form: ‘You are too young to fall asleep for ever;/And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.’ (Rattiner and Samoy, 2018, p.92). When combined with the rhythm and the pause of the semicolon as of an inhaled breath — of relief, of fear, of exhaustion — and with the final ‘dead’ hammered into the poem like the last nail in a coffin through its rhyme with the word ‘head’ two lines prior, this conclusion to the poem acts as a gut punch to the reader. We are drawn into the persona’s emotion, and then presented with the reality of how war can make something as innocent as sleep feel like a danger. Conflating sleep and death in this way drives home the dread, the terror, and the loss experienced.

Where this second poem by Sassoon demonstrates one kind of versatility in using form to convey meaning, Owen’s ‘The Send-Off’ doubles down on his unique use of visual elements and mixing of traditional and non-traditional spins on convention in one. In many ways, ‘The Send-Off’ is a coda to ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, speaking no longer of the state of youth broadly and its loss in combat but honing in directly on the moment of the send-off. The reader, for their part, can just as easily interpret this as a literal send-off to the frontlines, or a metaphorical send-off to the afterlife following death at the front.

Owen again employs a regular rhyme scheme in a unique way. This time, it is unruptured, steadily ABAAB CDCCD EFEEF GHGGH. Steady, but unusual, and made even more unusual by the choice of line length. The syllables remain fairly regular in their rhythm — iambic — but the number of feet per sentence differs. Taking the first stanza as an example of the rule that follows for the three successive ones, all A lines are effectively pentameter; however, the B lines are all dimeter, save solely for line 2, which is tetrameter. What this creates is a sense of push and pull, a movement forward and a pause. Even as the soldiers march to war, there is something pulling at their feet — a sense of dread, or pity, or finality, that creates an untimely stop even in the face of forward movement. Visually and sonically, it also mirrors the pace of the war — a steady, painful back and forth across a few miles of territory, and the uneven land riddled with shell craters — just as easily as it mirrors the pace of a marching army.

A final note is on the personae in the story. The point of view is detached; not until line 12 do we get the word ‘ours’, creating a sense of bond between the narrator and the reader, situating this experience as something communal. Much of this poem, however, is about widening the distance between the soldier and the home front, as much a touch of Modernism in its detachment as Owen’s own poetic intent. Nameless porters and a tramp feature in the second stanza; yells with no identity are mentioned in the final stanza. The namelessness, the sense of a great mass of experience, creates a sense of universality. Contrasted with Sassoon’s honing in on the individual, Owen here and in ‘Anthem’ chooses to address the war and its fighters en masse. This is a struggle of millions, of the many, on the home front and the frontlines, and a reader may find themselves within the work without requiring a specific persona to attach themselves to. The form does the work so that the diction can stand free and speak its truth.

Through these poems, their messaging is shaped by the way in which this form deploys the choice of words. However, it is clear that in Sassoon’s poetry the persona is given agency by form, which serves the ways in which it experiences internal conflict as a reflection of the external conflict of the war. In contrast, Owen’s form serves the cold desolation of his imagery, creating a detachment from the persona and enhancing the sense of being unmoored, the estrangement from normalcy, and the quiet pity in contrast with the pounding guns — the gulf between so many points of the ‘then’ and the ‘now’ that war creates. All of this impacts the connection with the reader, the narrative distance, and the intention.

Owen had a greater focus upon illustrating and lamenting the horrors of war, using form as a framework upon which his command of diction could shine through, and inviting readers to come and see and thereby understand. He wanted to bring the reader to the futile parade march, to the pained moments in the trenches, to the interchanging desolation and loud, violent horror of artillery barrages across No Man’s Land. This was to capture the truth of his experience. Sassoon, on the other hand, sought not only to show but more dearly to persuade, speaking to the heart of the reader by using form to mould a persona with which a reader could form an emotional tie, pulling them into the trenches. He sought to forge that connection between the reader as an individual and the soldier’s persona as an individual as well, creating a more visceral and personal reaction to the thought processes — more so than the visuals — of a soldier affected by months exposed to the front lines and the stress, fatigue, danger, pain, and loss. In sum, Owen wanted the reader to see the battlefield; Sassoon wanted the reader to be the soldier.

© Sarah Rachel Westvik, 2020

Works Cited

• Owen, W. (2013). “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” Complete Poems by Wilfred Owen. Pickering: Blackthorn press. p. 12
• Owen, W. (2013). “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” Complete Poems by Wilfred Owen. Pickering: Blackthorn press. p. 13
• Sassoon, S. eds. Rattiner, S.L. and Samoy, S.C. (2018). “The Hero.” War Poems: Dover Thrift Edition. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. p. 28.
• Sassoon, S. eds. Rattiner, S.L. and Samoy, S.C. (2018). “The Dug-Out.” War Poems: Dover Thrift Edition. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. p. 92.
• Trott, V. (2018). ““The Poetry is in the Pity”: Wilfred Owen and the Memory of the First World War”. World War 1 Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings. University of Oxford/JISC. Accessed 5 January 2021. Available at: http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/the-poetry-is-in-the-pity-wilfred-owen-and-the-memory-of-the-first-world-war/

Note: This analytical close reading was originally written in 2020 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for my Undergraduate Diploma in English Literature: Literature Past and Present at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. It is reproduced here in full to share my thoughts and analysis with the general public.