Siegfried Sassoon was an authentic military hero: extremely popular among the men under his command, prone to what his friend Robert Graves called “suicidal feats of bravery,” twice wounded, awarded the Military Cross (the third highest military decoration in the United Kingom, roughly equivalent to the Silver Star in the U.S. armed forces), and recommended for but not awarded the Victoria Cross (equivalent to the Medal of Honor). His poetry, however, is nothing like the patriotic call-to-arms of John McCrae or the romantic view of war expressed in Brooke’s sonnets. Nor does it resemble Thomas’s poems. How would you describe the mood and attitude of these poems?
Robert Graves’s “Goliath and David” employs a technique that would come to be associated with the movement called Modernism: connecting contemporary experience to or viewing it through the central texts of western civiliization, including the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, and a few others. In this poem, the reference is overt, but often the poem seems to be entirely focused on the older story while the connection to contemporary events is subtextual. What advantages does this approach bring?
Ivor Gurney was a gifted composer who began writing poetry seriously at the front after he had volunteered for the war. After the war, he went insane. How much of a role his war experiences (he was wounded and gassed at different times) played in his insanity is uncertain; he had had a lesser mental breakdown before the war. But by 1922, despite considerable success after the war, he needed to be institutionalized, officially wth a diagnosis of “deferred shell shock,” and he spent the remaining fifteen years of his life confined. He continued to write, while suffering from the delusion that he was William Shakespeare. “Pain” provides evidence of his talents. What do you see — or more accurately hear — in this poem that demonstrates them?
Alternatively, you may explicate any of these poems, or any portion of one of these poems, as fully as you can. As always with poetry, your focus should be on not only what the theme or message of the poem is but on how the poem conveys it. Remember that in an effective poem, the form of the poem recapitulates the theme. Do not merely paraphrase. Write about what makes the poem — or passage within the poem — effective.