Assignment 3 Elegy -Drew Sorenson

To Any Dead Officer

By: Siefried Sassoon

Well, how are things in Heaven? I wish you’d say,

  Because I’d like to know that you’re all right.

Tell me, have you found everlasting day,

  Or been sucked in by everlasting night?

For when I shut my eyes your face shows plain;

  I hear you make some cheery old remark—

I can rebuild you in my brain,

  Though you’ve gone out patrolling in the dark.

 

You hated tours of trenches; you were proud

  Of nothing more than having good years to spend;

Longed to get home and join the careless crowd

  Of chaps who work in peace with Time for friend.

That’s all washed out now. You’re beyond the wire:

  No earthly chance can send you crawling back;

You’ve finished with machine-gun fire—

  Knocked over in a hopeless dud-attack.

 

Somehow I always thought you’d get done in,

  Because you were so desperate keen to live:

You were all out to try and save your skin,

  Well knowing how much the world had got to give.

You joked at shells and talked the usual “shop,”

  Stuck to your dirty job and did it fine:

With “Jesus Christ! when will it stop?

  Three years ... It’s hell unless we break their line.”

 

So when they told me you’d been left for dead

  I wouldn’t believe them, feeling it must be true.

Next week the bloody Roll of Honour said

   “Wounded and missing”—(That’s the thing to do

When lads are left in shell-holes dying slow,

  With nothing but blank sky and wounds that ache,

Moaning for water till they know

  It’s night, and then it’s not worth while to wake!)

 

Good-bye, old lad! Remember me to God,

  And tell Him that our politicians swear

They won’t give in till Prussian Rule’s been trod

  Under the Heel of England ... Are you there? ...

Yes ... and the war won’t end for at least two years;

But we’ve got stacks of men ... I’m blind with tears,

  Staring into the dark. Cheero!

I wish they’d killed you in a decent show.

This particular poem has some elements of the traditional elegy, just not in a traditional context. The grief and sorrow part is evident in the first paragraph, as our speaker can remember this deceased officer and is brought to grief by his memory. Thereafter we get a shift from a normal elegy, as the praise for the idealized dead is rather harsh and somewhat critical of the dead ("Somehow I always thought you’d get done in") and the praise seems to put the blame for the subject's death on the subject (Because you were so desperate keen to live: You were all out to try and save your skin"), demonstrating the speaker's bitter attitude toward the subject's death and the seemingly needless sacrifice of so many soldiers' lives during the First World War. The consolation and solace in the last paragraph instead of being about this individual soldier's death is about the stupidity and lack of foresight on the part of his superiors and his politicians. Only at the very last line does the speaker give any further thought about the soldier, and it seems poor consolation: I wish you would've died better. As far as my enjoyment of the poem was concerned, I like the point it makes and how this point was made through the interpretation of an elegy. I liked too how the rhyme scheme was consistent without being forced or otherwise cheesy.