by Siegfried Sassoon
“Repression of War
Experience” surprised me for two reasons. Firstly, amongst all the legendary
characters of Craiglockart Military Hospital, Sassoon is remembered as the sane
one. Yet here, his protagonist is “going stark, staring mad because of the
guns.” Also, Sassoon is famous for his cleverly insulting epigrams, but this
piece employs soft, though unnerving, images and a confessional tone.
The first stanza begins with
light, a symbol of life, yet immediately introduces the moth, turning the
source of light into “liquid flame”, into danger, into thoughts of war. At
once, the protagonist represses these thoughts and establishes insanity as
losing control of “ugly thoughts”.
The second stanza also
begins with light and the protagonist succeeds in breathing, counting,
pondering over the weather and shelves of books before once again noticing the
moth. The protagonist foretells the fate of the moth and sees the garden, a
symbol of nature, as ground for decay.
There is no shortage of
films, novels, stories or poems asserting that sanity is the ultimate casualty
of war. Sassoon does not depict nightmares of explosions and unrecognizable
bodies. He does not allow the reader to stand at a distance and shudder at the
horror of it all. His potency comes from the familiarity of candles and pipes,
gardens and moths, from the subversive twisting of light and nature into war
and decay.
When I performed a search
online, I found a paper of the same name on psychiatry by Sassoon’s friend,
William Halse Rivers Rivers. In the paper, Rivers advocates catharsis, bringing
to the surface the suppressed body of experience so that it again becomes
reintegrated with the ordinary personality. Insanity, then, is the denial of
“ugly thoughts”. Considering the fact that war poetry in general is almost as
rhetorical as war propaganda, it is quite impressive that this poem may spark
interest in the study of war neurosis.
As usual, Sassoon taunts the
old men, but he also mocks books, the futility wisdom amidst “whispering guns”,
wisdom without sanity.
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