Aftermath

by Pericles Lewis

Siegfried Sassoon belonged to a young group of poets who recorded their reactions to the First World War with bitter irony and rejected the poetic diction of older men like Rudyard Kipling and Henry Newbolt, who had published patriotic hymns in traditional meters. Sassoon and the other young war poets brought rats and corpses into English poetry. In "Aftermath" (1919), Sassoon writes:

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz—
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench—
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’

Corpses here have none of the dignity afforded them in the poems of Rupert Brooke; they are merely decaying flesh. The new diction—rats, corpses, stench—reflected a new rhetorical stance. Newbolt, among the most popular poets of the pre-war years, had written approvingly that the literary public demands from the poet “that he shall chant to them...their own morality, their own religion, their own patriotism.”^[1] The war made such affirmations of conventional beliefs appear hollow. Poets who were themselves combatants, like Sassoon, tended to be skeptical of the consoling function of poetry.^[2]

1. ↑Quoted in C. K. Stead, The New Poetic (London: Hutchinson, 1964), p. 70.
2. ↑This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 110-111.