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Dead Body

Siegfried Sassoon, bio in Norton Modern Poetry

• Known for “short satirical poems” written during WWI serving for Britain (423)
  • Poems written before them were in Georgian collections (Marsh’s ones)
  • First war poems: heroic, chivalric
  • Then goes to trenches, intending to take everything down in his memory
    • 1917, sent home b/c wounded; wanted to be court-martialed to express opinions about horrific attitude of public (people profiting from war); but sent back to France
    • Turns pacifist
    • Saw fellow officer Robert Graves’ poetry
• Jewish family; dad died early; mom raised him; well off; Cambridge
  • Before death, converted to Catholicism
  • Wrote lots of autobio prose
• Style
  • He knew he was out of style: he prefers “direct utterance” (424), while since the 20s he noted that poetry was much more about the “indirect utterance”
  • Wants to create natural, personal voice with “urgent” message, inspired and sincere
    • Earlier opinion that Robert Graves’ war poems were too open and honest, now completely reverses
• Editor’s conclusion: regarding some of the more emotional poems, “although the reader is willing to credit this state of near-madness, the poem itself cannot really contain it.” 424

Content, “To His Dead Body”

• Until last line could be read as a typical “you are better of now that you’re dead” type of reconciliation with a friend’s death
  • Your death was painful and terrible, but now you’re okay, and at least you’re no victim of war
• Last line: “Dear, red-faced father God who lit your mind.”
  • Could be that his redness is the sanguine flush of the healthy, jolly father (a Dickensian red) with lighting your mind being a kind metaphor for inspiration and life-giving spirit
  • Yet it could be the red of Satan and the “lit” your mind as the injury
• Ultimately the style settles the question: the speaker is calm with this knowledge, so he believes that God brings perhaps life and death but that even the bad has its compensations

Form

• Ten lines total, divided into 4 line first stanza and 6 line second stanza
• Awkward rhymes: cried / died, head / fled
  • painful!
• Use of dash before last line creates a meaningful pause
  • It is contrasted w/ the present participles used generously before that moment, giving you a sense that all the action stops, and now you’re calm, and that’s death