sarah cole
discontented’, his ‘ecstasies changed to an ugly cry’, and this characterization of the
speakingpersonae who populate his lyrics as harsh and abrasive is an accurate one.
Sometimes Sassoon’s anger has a clear direction, as in ‘Glory of Women’, in which
he attacks both English and German women as sinister in their ignorance, colluding
to victimize men, perpetuators not only of war, but of war’s biggest and most
dangerous myths: ‘You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave|Or wounded in a
mentionable place.|You worship decorations; you believe|That chivalry redeems
the world’s disgrace.’^43 Sassoon’s misogyny is recruited, in ‘Glory of Women’, into
a broader project of creating a poetry of protest. Anger is what politicizes, what
gives cultural potency, and other war poets, too, who may opt for a less strident
tone, also at times develop a form of anger to suit the political urgency of their
work. For Owen, the poetry is meant to be in the pity, but the politics, we might
say, is in the anger; his poems, like Sassoon’s, often spit furiously in the reader’s
face. Indeed, the direct turn against the reader—the ‘you’ which ironically recalls
the famous posters of avuncular figures pointing fingers at those who have not
volunteered for service—was a common move in First World War poems and has
strong tonal consequences, creating a dissonance between reader and writer that is
meant to open up the space for accusation. Equally vengeful as ‘Glory of Women’,
though less objectionable to a contemporary readership, is a poem like ‘To the
Warmongers’, in which Sassoon again directs his acid tongue at those he holds
responsible for the war:^44
I’m back again from hell
With loathsome thoughts to sell;
Secrets of death to tell;
And horrors from the abyss.
Young faces bleared with blood,
Sucked down into the mud,
You shall hear things like this,
Till the tormented slain
Crawl round and once again,
With limbs that twist awry
Moan out their brutish pain,
As the fighters pass them by.^45‘To the Warmongers’ is not the only poem to imagine the dead rising in protest
against the complacency and cynicism of civilian culture. The dead are imagined
in such lyrics as full of fury, their horrifying re-embodiment rendering them into
(^43) Sassoon, ‘Glory of Women’, inCollected Poems 1908–1956, 72.
(^44) To discuss protest in conjunction with Sassoon is to invoke his more literal protest: a statement
of dissent written in 1917, read before the House of Commons and printed inThe Times,anactof
defiance that Sassoon knew could have resulted in court martial. For his own description of the episode
in his autobiography, see Sassoon,The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston(London: Faber, 1972),
471–514.
(^45) Sassoon, ‘To the Warmongers’, inWar Poems, 77.