Jessie Pope’s attitude to war was that all men should join up and fight for the country and if men didn’t, they were cowards. Her poem, ‘Who’s for the game?’ was wrote as if she knew about fighting in a war. She made everything sound like a game. She used a phrase that would make people want to sign up by saying,
‘Who would much rather come back with a crotch
Than lie low and be out of the fun?’
This is what a lot of the poems were about, trying to guilt people into the war, but I think that I would rather be out of the fun than come back without a leg or any other injury. The poem has been written in a basic rhyming pattern, with alternate lines rhyming.
‘Who’s for the game, the biggest that’s played,
The red crashing game of a flight?
Who’ll grip and tackle the job unafraid?
And who thinks he’d rather sit tight?’
This was used because it was simple and effective. This meant that the poem was very successful in doing what it was aimed to do.
On the other hand Wilfred Owen and Sassoon’s poems were the opposite of the recruitment poems. Wilfred Owen's poem ‘Exposure’ describes the coldness of world war one waiting in the front line for an enemy attack. It describes how the soldiers felt in the trenches, in winter. Soldiers were day-dreaming, only to wake up to find someone dead with their eyes frozen open. The verse that this is in starts with alliteration to make it sound worse, ‘Tonight, this frost will fasten on this mud and us.’
His other poem, ‘Dulce et Decorum est,’ was written to go against what the recruitment poems were saying, has quite disturbing detail in it, which is used to contradict what Jessie Pope wrote in particular, as her poems annoyed him. The poem portrayed some horrific images,
‘His hanging face, like devils’ sick of sin’
‘Of vile, incurable sores, on innocent tongues’
He used many horrific words to capture the real horror of the war and create the worst images of the war as possible.
Sassoon also did not like the recruitment poems and the people on the home front who keep telling people that war is heroic. The last verse in his poem ‘Suicide in the Trenches’ is aimed at the people at home that sit there and cheer at the soldiers, when they do not know anything about war.
‘You smug faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell and youth and laughter go.’
This also has a basic rhyming pattern, with rhyming couplets. This would make it easier for the people at home to understand what Sassoon meant. This poem also describes what goes through the brains of the soldiers in the trenches; ‘He put a bullet through his brain.’ It is simple and precise.
Jessie Pope, who wrote recruitment poems from the relative safety of the home front, had no idea what happened at war. She thought that war was a game. This is what angered Owen and Sassoon. I think they wrote their poems, not only to recreate the horrific images of the war, but also to show the recruitment poets that war was nothing like what they had said. Owen and Sassoon wrote their poems to give people the truth about the war. They felt the recruitment poems did not have any truth in them and so they wanted to let people know the full story about the life in the trenches.
Both types of poetry were very effective in what they had to do, but in very different ways. The recruitment poets used certain words and phrases to guilt the readers into signing up or making regret not signing up. The images in owen and Sassoon’s poems, however, were realistic and portrayed images of horror, to make recruitment poets, such as Jessie Pope, realise that war is not a game.
By James Braybrook
