66 Siegfried (Loraine) Sassoon, the poet whom Masefield hailed as 'one of England's most brilliant rising stars," was born September 8, 1886. He was educated at Marlborough and Clare College, Cambridge, and was a captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. He fought three times in France, once in Palestine, winning the Military Cross for bringing in wounded on the battlefield. His poetry divides itself sharply in two moods the lyric and the ironic. His early lilting poems were without significance or individuality. But with The Old Huntsman (1917) Sassoon found his own idiom, and became one of the leading younger poets upon the appearance of this striking volume. The first poem, a long monologue evidently inspired by Masefield, gave little evidence of what was to come. Immediately following it, however, came a series of war poems, undisguised in their tragedy and bitterness. Every line of these quivering stanzas bore the mark of a sensitive and outraged nature; there was scarcely a phrase that did not protest against the "glorification" and false glamour of war. Counter-Attack appeared in 1918. In this volume Sassoon turned entirely from an ordered loveliness to the gigantic brutality of war. At heart a lyric idealist, the bloody years intensified and twisted his tenderness till what was stubborn and satiric in him forced its way to the top. In Counter-Attack, Sassoon found his angry outlet. Most of these poems are choked with passion; many of them are torn out, roots and all, from the very core of an intense conviction; they rush on, not so much because of the poet's art but almost in spite of it. Early in 1920 Sassoon visited America. At the same time he brought out his Picture Show (1920), a vigorous answer to those who feared that Sassoon had "written himself out" or had begun to burn away in his own fire. Recreations, a privately distributed volume, printed at Christmas, 1923, for his friends, shows Sassoon in a more playfully intellectual vein. Less direct than his deeper notes, these fifteen poems display another highly interesting though less emotional side of Sassoon's genius. Satirical Poems, a collection of this genre, appeared in 1926. Sassoon's three volumes are the most vital and unsparing records of the war we have had. They synthesize in poetry what Barbusse's Under Fire spreads out in panoramic prose. DREAMERS Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land, 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. THE REAR-GUARD Groping along the tunnel, step by step, He winked his prying torch with patching glare From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air. Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know, The rosy gloom of battle overhead. Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lie And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug. "I'm looking for headquarters." No reply. "God blast your neck!" (For days he'd had no sleep.) "Get up and guide me through this stinking place." Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap, And flashed his beam across the livid face And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound. Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound. AFTERMATH Have you forgotten yet? ... For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days, Like traffic checked awhile at the crossing of city ways: And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you're a man reprieved to go, Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare. game. Have you forgotten yet? Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget. Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz, The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets? Do you remember the rats; and the stench Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench, And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen again?" Do you remember that hour of din before the attack, And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men? Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back Have you forgotten yet? Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget. EVERYONE SANG Everyone suddenly burst out singing; Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted, ... Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the THE WISDOM OF THE WORLD 66 The wisdom of the world is this; to say There is Possibly the most famous of the Georgians, Rupert (Chawner) Brooke, was born at Rugby in August, 1887, his father being assistant master at the school. As a youth, Brooke was keenly interested in all forms of athletics, playing cricket, football, tennis, and swimming as well as most professionals. He was six feet tall, his finely molded head topped with a crown of loose hair of lively brown; a golden young Apollo," said Edward Thomas. Another friend of his wrote, "To look at, he was part of the youth of the world." 66 At the very outbreak of the war, Brooke enlisted, fired with an idealism that conquered his irony. After seeing service in Belgium, 1914, he spent the following winter in a training-camp in Dorsetshire and sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in February, 1915, to take part in the unfortunate Dardanelles Campaign. Brooke never reached his destination. He died of blood-poison at Skyros, April 23, 1915. His early death was one of England's great literary losses. Collected Poems, issued posthumously, appeared a few months after. Brooke's sonnet-sequence, 1914 (from which "The Soldier" is taken), which, with prophetic irony, appeared a few weeks before his death, contains the accents of immortality. And "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" (unfortunately too long to reprint in this volume), is fully as characteristic of the lighter and more playful side of Brooke's temperament. Both these phases are combined in “The Great Lover," of which Lascelles Abercrombie has written, "It is life he loves, and not in any abstract sense, but all the infinite little familiar details of life, remembered and catalogued with delightful zest." SONNET 1 Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire Of the last land! There, waiting patiently, One day, I think, I'll feel a cool wind blowing, And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing, And tremble. And I shall know that you have died. 1 From The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Copyright, 1915, by John Lane Company and reprinted by permission. |