SIEGFRIED SASSOON – The Heart’s Journey

Siegfried Sassoon was one of that small number of poets whose names became permanently associated with the Great War. The others included Rupert Brook, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves. Brook, Owen and Rosenberg died in the war, while Sassoon, Blunden and Graves survived. Graves became a prolific writer in a multitude of fields and a revered public figure. Sassoon continued to write, achieving fame for his series of fictionalised autobiographies, known collectively as the Sherston memoirs, evoking the England of the pre-war years and of the war itself. He also published a steady stream of poetry from the early 1920s until shortly before his death in 1967. This poetry, when seen as a whole, builds into a striking self-portrait of a man moving step by step on what he called “The Heart’s Journey” through a world in which he felt increasingly alienated; in doing so he also gives us his picture of that world. After the shattering experience of the war, Sassoon was a deeply troubled man who was searching for something, for values and beliefs that might restore meaning to a world which had been diminished, cheapened and violated. That search absorbed his life for forty years and more, and took a number of forms, all of them expressing the disintegration, fatality and helplessness which he felt when faced with life in a civilisation that was cracking up, poisoned by the terrible legacy of the war itself.   

              Sassoon came from a wealthy family, so that after leaving Cambridge without troubling to take a degree, he never needed to work, preferring instead the life of a sporting country-gentleman and literary dilettante. He published privately several collections of forgettable Georgian verse on traditional country themes written in traditional forms of rhyme and metre. Nevertheless these early poems show a genuine poetic temperament, revealing itself occasionally in an arresting line:

                             For I am lone, a dweller among men,

                            Hungered for what my heart shall never say.    

The war put an end to this phase of his life, and he enlisted immediately, only to suffer a badly broken arm in a riding accident, which caused him to miss the military action of the first year. Like many other writers, he wrote at first war poetry of a consciously romantic kind, finding in war nobility, courage, self-sacrifice and even beauty. Not surprisingly, this phase did not long survive his delayed arrival at the Western Front in November 1915, when the patriotic ideals began to dissolve. Turning away from abstract idealism, he began to bring the sights, sounds and horrors of war into his poems, first to express his own sense of shock, and then to construct an overtly anti-war agenda for others to read. These poems are usually brief narratives of the fighting and its aftermath of dead and wounded; photographs might be a better description of these poems, inspired by the individual victims of history’s forces of which they knew nothing:

                            I see them in foul dugouts, gnawed by rats,

                             And in the ruined trenches lashed by rain.

And to this physical horror is added a revolutionary anger against those in the government and the military high command who had unleashed this senseless reign of suffering and death. These poems would arouse shock and fierce arguments in England when they were published in 1917, and readers were deeply confused when they learned that their author was an officer who had been decorated for outstanding bravery, and therefore knew very well what he was talking about. Press criticism judged these poems to be “grotesquely horrid”, and “the protests of a tortured spirit.” Brave military hero or not, Sassoon himself was undergoing a prolonged breakdown as he wrestled with his feelings about the slaughter that was taking place in France, and his own part in it. Fate took a hand when he received a serious bullet wound and he was sent back to England to recover; his return to a world of sanity, contrasted with the insane savagery across the Channel, spurred him to act.

              The decision that he came led to the most famous and most discussed action of his life. In June 1917 he wrote a personal statement “as an act of wilful defiance of military authority,” and a refusal any longer to a be a party to the sufferings of the troops. He claimed that British troops had been deceived about the war, “upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation,” but which had now become “a war of aggression and conquest”. He further alleged that people at home in England had no conception of the reality of the fighting, and they too were being lied to by the politicians and military commanders. Copies of this statement were circulated widely through the upper echelons of the military and political world, and Sassoon confidently awaited a court martial in which he would state his case. But the army was wary and clever, ordering him to be examined by doctors, with the expected result that he was found to be mentally disturbed, and must enter a military hospital for mental patients, many of whom were suffering from shattered nerves, commonly termed “shell-shock.” Here, with the help of the outstanding doctor, William Rivers, Sassoon did indeed recover his mental balance, and he came to accept that his standpoint had been over-simplified. By the winter of 1917-18, he was willing to return to active service, although the army did not send him immediately back to the Western Front, but to Egypt for five months, before he was deemed fit for France, to share the martyrdom of his men, for whom he felt an overwhelming duty and affection, and of whom he wrote:

                             The darkness tells how vainly I have striven

                             To free them from the pit where they must dwell

                             In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven

                             By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.

                             Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;

                             And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.

Barely three months later, in July, Sassoon was shot in the head (ironically by friendly fire) and he was back in England, and although he did not know it, the war for him was now over.

The life that he had led from his youth to the summer of 1914 was now a distant memory, while in some ways that England scarcely existed any longer. Intellectually, emotionally and politically his experiences had left him a changed man, except that he was still wealthy and still member of the upper-class elite. He was also confirmed in his vocation as a poet, for that role had accompanied him throughout the chaos and conflicts which he had endured, and his poetry had become harder and sharper; it had left the Georgian country-gentleman’s study and walked among the dead and dying in France. He had acquired  a considerable degree of fame as a war hero and a poet, and also some notoriety as a rebel. Now, in a time of peace, he must re-make his life and his art as a writer, pull the various strands of his personality and his environment together, and distil some blend of honesty, wisdom, belief and love to take him into the future.

Of these, love would be central, for Sassoon no longer tried to evade the truth of his homosexual nature. In the post-war years in London, and in his many travels, in brief encounters and in deeper relationships, he became familiar with the homosexual circles of the day, surprisingly crowded and un-secret, in view of the legal situation then in force. He went through many crises and his output of poetry dwindled, until late in 1923 he burned almost all his recent poetry, and started again. His work during the following dozen years shows a complex veering between social satire, sometimes caustic, sometimes half-affectionate; an obsession with the lost past and the England of his youth; and  intense introspection into his spiritual life; these themes were often intertwined, and however various they may be, they are controlled by a distinct world-view that merged philosophy with passion. Although he knew that he was a member of England’s social and cultural élite, his satirical verse was an expression of his loathing of what that phrase stood for. In the Royal Academy he responds to some of Sargent’s lush society portraits:

                             If Sargent could have called his soul his own

                             And had not been the hireling of the rich,

                             There’d not be many portraits now re-shown

                             Of ladies lovelified to ball-room pitch;

                             Nor would these multiplied admirers crush

                             To crane their necks at sempiternal hostesses

                             Whom by the brilliant boredom of his brush

                             He silenced into fashion-dated ghostesses;

                             Nor would my soul feel quite so mocked and chilly

                             When I rejoin plebeian Piccadilly.

Sassoon’s nostalgia for pre-war England expressed itself in relaxed doggerel like this:

                             Young people now – they don’t know what the past was like.

                             Then one could find the main roads museful on one’s bike.

                             Give me a moment and I’m back in Kent; I know

                             How safe and sound life struck me long ago.

                             Kent was all sleepy villages through which I went

                             Carrying my cricket bag. In wintertime, content

                             To follow hounds across wet fields, I jogged home tired.

                             In 1909 the future was a thing desired.

But it could also be ethereal in mood and lyrical in form:

                            Music…there was a bright white room below,

                            And someone singing a song about a soldier,

                            One hour, two hours ago; and soon the song

                            Will be “last night”; but now the beauty swings

                            Across my brain, ghost of remembered chords

                            Which still can make such radiance in my dream

                            That I can watch the marching of my soldiers,

                            And count their faces; faces, sunlit faces.

                            Falling asleep …the herons and the hounds…

                            September in the darkness; and the world

                            I’ve known; all fading past me into peace.

The spiritual side of his nature came to assert itself more and more clearly in the 1927 collection The Heart’s Journey, where the language becomes overtly religious:

                             Soul, be my song; return arrayed in white;

                             Lead home the loves that I have wronged and slain:

                             Bring back the summer dawns that banished night

                             With distant-warbling bird-notes after rain …

                             Time’s way-worn traveller I. And you, O song,

                             O soul, my Paradise laid waste so long.

Deceptively simple, almost conversational, some of these brief poems of less than a dozen lines have the ring of true mystical poetry, lacking only one element – the presence of God:

                         “When I’m alone” – the words tripped off his tongue

                             As though to be alone were nothing strange

                          “When I was young,” he said, “when I was young…”

                             I thought of age, and loneliness, and change.

                             I thought how strange we grow when we’re alone,

                             And how unlike the selves that meet and talk,

                             And blow the candle out, and say good-night.

                           “Alone…” The word is life endured and known.

                             It is the stillness where our spirits walk

                             And all but inmost faith is overthrown.                                 

These passages indicate that Sassoon had very definitely moved on from the war poems which had made his reputation, that he was accepting into his work a wide range of personal and social experience. One aspect of his work is unmistakable, namely his loyalty to traditional verse forms; he was not a modernist, he did not write in free verse, and he had not accepted the poetic revolution set in motion by Eliot, Pound, Cummings and others – the revolution which would soon be anglicised by Auden and his followers. Instead his work still shows the legacy of the Georgians; he shared their country background and admired Hardy as the greatest living poet; he sets up echoes of Wordsworth and Tennyson; his references to dreams, ghosts, and moonlit nights are reminiscent of de la Mare. This adherence to traditional verse-forms was in itself a statement of his ties to past values and beliefs. Having been ripped out of his country-gentleman background by the war, and having faced up to his position as an homosexual outsider, he wrote sometimes as if he was attempting to build up a new identity by returning to the security and order of the past, but at other times he could admit that this was an unrealistic dream:

                            Within my heart’s mysterious walls

                            The dreamer that was Youth lies dead.   

He evidently felt very strongly that he needed a new force in his life, and perhaps even sensed that it might be a spiritual or religious force for which he was not yet prepared.

              In the meantime a great change came over Sassoon’s life when he married in 1933 a woman twenty years his junior from a rich upper-class family. He had previously been attracted to women, although less strongly than to men; but now he felt that this beautiful girl could surely open a new life for him. He bought a grand Georgian manor house in Wiltshire which would remain his home for the rest of his life, and put an end to the raffish lifestyle of his recent years, encouraging his hope that he had taken a great step towards redemption. Unfortunately the early happiness of the marriage was short-lived: a final separation did not come for many years, but the long experience of a loveless marriage plunged him back into bitterness and self-doubt, made worse by his premonition, as early as 1936, that war would come again, and his pessimism was deep:

                            We are souls in hell; who hear no gradual music

                            Advancing on the air, on wave-lengths walking.

                            We are lost in life; who listen for hope and hear but

                            The tyrant and the politician talking.

                            Out of the nothingness of night they tell

                            Our need of guns, our servitude to strife.

                            O heaven of music, absolve us from this hell

                            Into unmechanised mastery of life.

He was still travelling on “The Heart’s Journey” on which he had set out in 1927, but it was harder than he had imagined, and there were many hints that he was waiting for the religious dimension to open before him. In The Heart’s Journey collection he was already writing about the seventeenth-century mystic, Henry Vaughan, in an ornate, metaphysical style, arguing within himself, and confessing his sense of sin, while still being drawn back to memories of the war. Writing on the new Menin Gate war memorial, he exclaims, “Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime/ Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.” But the war had become a background to still darker thoughts about the future:

                            In breaking of belief in human good;

                            In slavedom of mankind to the machine;

                            In havoc of hideous tyranny withstood,

                            And terror of atomic doom foreseen;

                            Deliver us from ourselves. 

Written in the year of his marriage, these and other grim poems did not augur well for his peace of mind. The 1934 collection, Vigils, included many pieces that are more tranquil, some even overtly spiritual, looking back to the past in Blake-like terms:

                            There every flower was fancy’s child,

                            And every tree was glory’s guest

                             And Love, by darkness undefiled,

                            Went like the sun from east to west.

Yet he is still troubled by dreams and ghosts of “The dead demanding to be remembered,” and he confesses that “Within my heart’s mysterious walls/ The dreamer that was youth lies dead.” Among the dead, perhaps the one who clamoured loudest was Wilfred Owen. Junior to Sassoon, and cut short far younger, Owen, in most people’s estimation, excelled Sassoon in the richness and depth of his war-poems. For Owen, the war is felt as an almost cosmic shattering our understanding and our imagination. His poems are not long, but they are not miniatures either, as so many of Sassoon’s were, and they have a deeply serious, epic quality. Sassoon felt this as other readers did, and he admitted that he suffered a stab of jealousy that Owen’s reputation rose steadily, while his own reputation remained static, or even declined. The great difference is that Sassoon’s poetry developed to become the record of an entire lifetime, while Owen’s was frozen in time, and cruelly finite.

In this period, and indeed in all Sassoon’s work, there is the plenitude of memorable lines and phrases that marks the true poet; most often with a melancholy, haunted feeling echoing Hardy’s bleak late Victorian pessimism. We have to remind ourselves that Sassoon was living through a mental and emotional transformation that was completely out of step with the new avant-garde in English poetry that was being spearheaded by Auden, MacNeice and their followers; but nevertheless Sassoon was as involved and tormented as they were, if not more so, to find himself living in an age, “When world ideas like wolves are on the run.” The difference with Sassoon was his faith that the language of traditional poetry, reaching back through the nineteenth century and sometimes much further, was the right language in which to express his inner life, his “Heart’s Journey.” He would have to live once again through a World War, still more terrible than the First, before he could admit to himself that not mankind’s virtue or power could redeem his life, but only God’s:

                            No angels tread my nights with feet of flame;

                            No mystery is mine,

                            No whisper from that world beyond my sense.

                            I think: if through some chink in me could shine

                            But once – O but one ray

                            From that all-hallowing and eternal day,

                            Asking no more of Heaven I would go hence.

This is from the 1950 collection entitled Common Chords, a title which suggests that he was ready to surrender himself to the faith which had guided untold millions of other people through their live. Just one year later, in Emblems of Experience, the crucial step is taken and the word God is spoken, and is the subject of his prayer:

                            Nobody hears

                            Bells from beyond the silence of the years

                            That wait for those unborn.

                            O God within me, speak from your mysterious morn.

By 1954 he was ready to publish his conversion to an absolute faith in God, and two years later he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. The title poem of the collection called The Tasking is an unambiguous confession that his “Heart’s Journey” was completed, and he was at rest in spirit.

                            To find rewards of mind with inward ear

                            Through silent hours of seeking;

                            To put world sounds behind and hope to hear

                            Instructed spirit speaking:

                            Sometimes to catch a clue from selfhood’s essence

                            And ever that revealment to be asking:

                            This – and through darkness to divine God’s presence –

                             I take to be my tasking. 

Intellectually, theologically, he did not seek to justify his faith. He wanted the certainty that there was purpose, authority and sanctity in this world and beyond it, and that his Church was the guarantor of it. He was seventy years old, and he called almost his final poetry collection The Path to Peace, thus consummating The Heart’s Journey; a dozen years before his death in 1967, he had found peace.

              Sassoon deserves to be released form the pigeon-hole of “War Poet” in which he has long been confined. The war was vitally important in his life, but it was not the whole of that life; he was a poet for fifty years, but only five of them during and immediately after the war. He was a romantic and a traditionalist, a sensualist and a mystic. He was of the wealthy and privileged elite, so that his life was easy in a material sense, and his work in both verse and prose was highly successful, earning him still more money; his inner life however was tormented. It was this torment which he disciplined and fashioned into a prolonged series of miniature poems which were really confessions, messages to the outside world, posted along the way of his heart’s’s journey. “I am a pre-machine age poet,” he wrote, “and therefore hopelessly old-fashioned. Schubert-minded, I crave tunefulness.” He did indeed uphold the concept of poetry as the music of ideas into a time when this had become a minority view. Honesty was one of his chief virtues as a writer, and it breathes through almost all his poems. Perhaps unintentionally, he wrote his own epitaph more than once, and this is perhaps the best of them:

                             I am that man who loves to ride alone

                            When landscapes wear his mind’s autumnal tone.

                             I am that man who, having lived his day,

                             Looks once on life and goes his wordless way.