Poetry Essay

[layangabi]

Explore the theme of sacrifice of the soldier in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

Few human figures embody sacrifice, with its core connotation of suffering at the will of a higher power, as poignantly as the soldier-figure in the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Invested with the patriotic ideals and romantic imaginings of European society, coded as the highest ideal of heroic masculinity, the soldier of World War I was idolized as the modern knight of chivalry, a young heroic figure “setting off to defend the weak, uphold his king’s honor, and find glory in combat” (Frantzen 13). Consequently, he was paradoxically a venerated figure and sacrificial object: a near-Christ figure, but one available for romanticization, and for the safe indulgement of heroic fantasy. A grotesque heroic fantasy, as Sassoon and Owen reveal in their poetry, the frail human body and psyche of the soldier wantonly sacrificed for the sake of an elusive masculine ideal. In Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” and Sassoon’s “For the Glory of Women,” Owen and Sassoon sought more than to destroy the heroic narratives centered around the soldier, they criticized the masculine ideals and imaginings an obsessed society expected the soldier to fulfill, and for which the soldier was wantonly destroyed.

Among the patriotic and romantic discourses in European society in the years which preceeded World War I there was an underlying, prevailing anxiety concerning masculinity. Patriotism itself was intricately tied to attitudes of masculinity: “my country’s weakness undermines my masculinity…my masculinity requires a strong military face in order to be whole” (Braudy 375). Modern European society, however, according to Leo Braudy, felt it had lost the “explicit rituals of masculinity” (ibid 373) and saw war as a means through which it could satisfy the need for its men to affirm, and reassert their manhood. War was the ultimate crucible through which the weak elements in society, and in the individual soldiers who fought, it “would be not just a cleansing of bad social blood, it would affirm national vitality and individual honor” (ibid 374). Further, in fighting for their country, and presumably, defending the women and children in the home front, the soldier not only affirmed his own position as paternal protector, he also elevated himself to the position of a romantic hero, a knight of chivalry sacrificing himself willingly for others and thus ennobling himself, regardless of his social status in society (Frantzen 118). Paradoxically, however, society’s image of the soldier, the embodiment of noble masculinity, was almost that of a superhuman: while intellectually, society might know the soldier risked his life in battle, that knowledge might be safely ignored in their romantic fantasies. “Powerful, superior and triumphant, the soldier heroes of adventure move through the field of battle without incurring serious harm, becoming the figures of an exceptionally potent and pleasurable form of identity” (Dawson 55).

It was inevitable that Owen and Sassoon, having been raised in a society obsessed with a narrow ideal of masculinity “defined by the ability to endure and inflict pain” (Caesar 7), and in a Christian-romantic tradition which regarded suffering and sacrifice as ennobling experiences (ibid 168), would subscribe initially to the romantic imaginings that were centered on war and the heroic soldier. Paul Moyes and others note Sassoon’s valor—some might say suicidal tendencies— in battle, and many of Sassoon’s private writings and early war poetry reflected the romantic discourses concerning war and the soldier (Moyes 36). Even after his brother was killed, Sassoon was able to find consolation in the certainty of his heroism: “But in the gloom I see your laurell’d head,/ and through your victory I shall win the light” (Sassoon 18). Owen, though initially reluctant to join, expressed similar sentiments: eagerly speaking of war as “adventure, a real, old, adventure” (Caesar 141) and in a letter to his mother: “There is a fine heroic feeling being about in France, and I am in perfect spirits” (Crawford 175). As homosexuals and poets (the latter strongly associated with the former), they would have been painfully aware that their mode of masculinity, was far from acceptable. War, Caesar suggests, offered them an escape from a restrictive and hostile society (Caesar 64), and further, through the crucible of war, their desire could be made acceptable, even ennobled in the form of male comradeship which was so central to the discourse of male chivalry and heroism surrounding the war (Frantzen 146). This idealism, of course, did not last long in the brutal reality of the war, and Owen’s and Sassoon’s poetry began to dismantle and bitterly attack the masculine narratives which they had been conditioned to accept, and to which civilians, and their military superiors expected them to conform. Their poetry took different approaches in attacking these discourses: first depicting in graphic, non romantic detail the experience of the soldier in battle, and in directly attacking noncombatant’s preoccupation with the fictional heroic narrative of the soldier.

Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum” depicts in graphic detail the death of a soldier from chlorine gas. From the beginning, Owen destroys any heroic imaginings we might have of the soldier: gone are the traditional romantic language and grand imagery used to portray the warrior-hero of old, raring to fight and die for their country and affirm his masculinity. In place of the image of the proud hero are pathetic figures, “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks” weighed down by misery and incredible weariness. “Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots/ but limped on, blood-shod” (Owen 1276). Owen further shears them of any attractiveness or power, describing them as “coughing hags,” connoting both disease, and a helpless femininity. Further, death is suggested to await all the soldiers on the march, as “towards our distant rest we began to trudge” (ibid 1276)

When Owen arrives at the death around which the poem is centered, it is devoid of any valor: the doomed soldier is killed not in direct “heroic” combat against the enemy, but by wretched chance, by failing to put on his protective mask in time. What follows is a graphic description of the man’s slow death under the narrator’s horrified gaze: “someone still was yelling out and stumbling/ And floundering like a man in fire or lime” (Owen 1276). Combining images of hell, and of death by fire and of death by drowning, Owen creates a nightmarish world of death and suffering in which the soldiers are trapped, and where the power to act is completely removed the soldier “heroes”: there is not even an enemy against whom to lash out: “through the misty panes and thick green light,/ As under a green sea, I saw him drowning” (ibid 1277). Here, Owen confronts the reader with the physical suffering of one soldier and the mental anguish of another: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,/ He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (ibid 1277). Like Sassoon, Owen uses “the materiality of the human body [as] a means to resist the abstractions of ideology” (Waterman 5).

If Owen’s “Dulce Est Decorum” dismantles the heroic narratives of patriotism and noble sacrifice through the materiality of the suffering body, Sassoon’s “For the Glory of Women” engages in direct criticism against these narratives. Here, Sassoon attacks the domestic sphere which the soldier was supposedly meant to safeguard through his participation in war (Crawford 128). From the perspective of the women in this poem, the soldier seem reduced to a fictional body, regardless of the personal relationships which might exist between them: the familial love of sisters and mothers, and the romantic love of sweethearts and wives in the home front is reduced to a conditional love, granted to their brothers, sons and lovers in war only if they fulfill their heroic narratives and imaginings of the soldier. “You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,/ Or wounded in some mentionable place” (Sassoon 1208, italics added). “Mentionable place” might refer to a wound not too grotesque for women’s sensibilities, but enough to endow the wounded a heroic air. Or the mere “physicality” of a wound, since those not engaged in combat were in little position to understand or accept the mental traumas suffered by soldiers. The human suffering of their own loved ones is trivialized when the women “listen with delight/ By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled./ You crown our distant ardours while we fight/and mourn our laurelled memories we’re killed” (Sassoon 1208).

Owen and Sassoon’s poetry may seem biased in favor of the soldier: Sassoon in particular sounds unrelentingly misogynist in his attack, blaming women in the home front for views he himself held prior to serving in the war (Crawford 128). Of Owen’s poetry, Caesar writes: “We are told of men dying, we do not hear of them of them killing” (Caesar 156). Some critics, such as Caesar, argue that Sassoon and Owen fall into the trap of proscribing to the heroic discourses they themselves sought to critique, in casting the soldier purely as a helpless victim. Undeniably, their own upbringing, and their experiences in the war may have colored their perceptions: their poems share an unrelenting sense of anger and betrayal against the society “guilty of violence against the very sons who are promised a future role as masters” (Waterman 2). Owen’s voice in “Dulce Et Decorum” borders on accusatory: “If in smothering dreams you too could pace…and watch the white eyes writhing in his face…” he writes, seeming to throw the agonizing death of the soldier in the reader’s face. Sassoon himself seems full of the same bitterness and anger, lashing out at the women who cling to the old patriotic discourses: ‘You can’t believe that British troops ‘retire’/When hell’s last horror breaks them and they run” (Sassoon 1208).

Yet their poetry provides space for tenderness and compassion as well, not only towards the soldier-victim, but the very society they see as complicit in their deaths, and even towards the “enemy.” Owen’s tone in “Dulce Est Decorum” may be taken as accusatory: it may also be taken as gentle pleading. The reader, the narrator presumes, is completely ignorant of what the solider endures. Owen seems aware of this, even forgiving, even as he describes the soldier’s death in relentless graphic detail: it is to force the reader to understand. “The last few lines seem full of knowing sadness, rather than self- righteous ire: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory,/The old Lie: Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro patri mori” (Owen 1276). Similarly, Sassoon, though full of caustic and bitter criticism, seems to find pity for the women losing their loved ones in the war, and to extend this compassion towards the “enemy.” The tender, poignant image of the “German mother dreaming by the fire…knitting socks to send [her] son” dismantles completely the traditional patriotic discourses of “self” and “other” usually found in the war. The narrator even seems to express guilt for the death of her son, whose “face is trodden deeper into the mud” (Sassoon 1208). Whether the soldier-narrator is directly responsible for his death, or simply expressing collective guilt, is left unclear, but in expressing this guilt, and in expressing compassion towards the “enemy,” Sassoon further dismantles the patriotic discourses of “self” and “other,” and the image of the soldier as a paternal protector against an inhuman enemy.

What Owen and Sassoon construct in their poetry is a human view of the soldier, within a historical context that saw the soldier purely as a fictional body, a means of affirming the masculine narratives of heroism and patriotism which the soldier was meant to embody. Owen and Sassoon, however, condemn and dismantle these narratives, positioning the soldier not as the fictional hero, but a real, material victim of these fictional narratives, of society’s need for affirmation of a masculine ideal. Their poetry instead constructs a different masculinity, one that does not adhere to these fictional forms, but instead, being forced to witness reality, is able to understand and internalize it, and consequently, is able to extend compassion for human suffering.



Bibliography:
Works Cited:
Owen, Wilfred, “Dulce Est Decorum Est.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Ed. Margaret Ferguson et al, New York: Norton, 1996.

Siegfried, Sassoon, “Glory of Women.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. New York: Norton, 1996.

Siegfried, Sassoon, “To My Brother.” The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. London: Faber and Faber, 1983.

Secondary Resources:
Braudy, Leo. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Caesar, Adrian. Taking it Like a Man: Suffering, Sensuality and the War Poets. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

Crawford, Fred D. British Poets of the Great War. London: Associated University Press, 1988.

Dawson, Graham. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities. London: Routledge, 1994.

Frantzen, Allen J. Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Moyes, Paul. Sassoon: Scorched Glory: A Critical Study. London: Macmillan Press, 1997.

Waterman, David F., Disordered Bodies and Disruption Borders: Representations of Resistance in Modern British Literature. Lanham: University Press of America, 1999.