Siegfried Loraine Sassoon CBE (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English soldier whose contributions to literature were inspired by his experiences on the Western Front during World War I. Though remembered primarily as a poet, he also penned works in prose, such as the semi-autobiographical Sherston Trilogy (composed of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress).
Tropes in the works of Siegfried Sassoon:
- Author Avatar: George Sherston, the hero of the Sherston Trilogy.
- Church Militant: The Bishop in "'They'" is supposed to exemplify what's wrong with this attitude.
- Creator Thumbprint: Blindness and darkness recur in a lot of his war poems, from drowning in mud ("... so I fell/Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light) to conventional injury ("Does it matter? — losing your sight?/There’s such splendid work for the blind").
- Deadpan Snarker: If his autobiography is anything to judge by.
- Driven to Suicide: Suicide in the Trenches, unsurprisingly.
- Drowning My Sorrows: Referenced in Does It Matter? as a solution to PTSD.Do they matter? Those dreams from the pit?You can drink and forget and be glad,And people won't say that you're mad...
- General Failure: Most famously in "The General":‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to JackAs they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.* * *But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
- Knight in Shining Armor: Several of the poems parody idealized representations of soldiers as chivalric medieval heroes, especially "Glory of Women."
- Soldiers at the Rear: Base Details.If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,And speed glum heroes up the line to death...
- Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion: Used brutally in Attack (which is also a wholesale subversion of the sonnet form). Its rhyme scheme is an apparently unique AABACBDCDEFFE, with every rhyme coming completely unexpected.
- War Is Glorious: As he states in the Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, "against the background of the war and its brutal stupidity those men had stood glorified by the thing which sought to destroy them".
- War Is Hell: Famous for his strong anti-war stance, Sassoon detailed the horrors of trench warfare, satirized the complacency of civilians and condemned the patriotic pretensions of those who wielded the power to end the war. "Memorial Tablet", written from the perspective of a fallen soldier says: "I died in hell — (They called it Passchendaele)."
