The soldier is about encouraging people to fight for Britain, and if you die you should be proud that you have died for England. The word ‘blest’ describes his ideas well because it means it is valuable and important. Brooke uses the word ‘England’ to try and state that he likes England and it is the best. He uses word ‘peace’ to express that he is at rest. The words ‘English heaven’ means that ware ever you die you will go to an English heaven.
In 1917 Siegfried Sassoon thought that the government was dragging the war on. Sassoon then wrote letters of complaint to the government explaining that war was a waste of life. The result was that Sassoon was sent to a mental home (Craiglockheart Hospital).
The poems ‘Attack’ and ‘Wirers’ try to show that war is not as people thought it would be. Sassoon tried to show in his poems that war was a waste of life and that it was pointless. The line ‘men jostle and climb to meat bristling fire’ shows that as soon as they get out of the trench they get shot, then when the next lot of men try and get over it is harder because of the other dead men on top ‘grappling fists’ they are wrestling to get over. The wirers kept getting caught on the wire, then made to much noise then got shot ‘clumsy ghosts’ and ‘tripped by clutching snare’. Those words show that the wirers were not efficient and organised.
In the poem Attack Sassoon used realistic detail, the line ‘Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire’ this explains that the tanks in the war were not sturdy and could fall over at any second. The alliteration in the line ‘Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud’ the repeated ‘s’ sounds emphasise how thick the smoke was. ‘Shroud’ is a good word to describe the smoke but it actually means a garment worn by the dead. In the poem on the last line. Sassoon is speaking to the leaders to make it stop ’O Jesu, make it stop’. This shows that Sassoon cares about people who were fighting in the war and knows that they shouldn’t have been.
In the wirers, the poem is about a group of men (wirers) who go over the top to fix the barbed wire. Down below people are telling everyone not to fire at the germens because they might shoot the wirers. Then the sun comes up and the wirers have to run back in to the trench but they get caught on the wire. Then some one called young Hughes got badly hit and was being carried away, ’Hughes was badly hit; I heard him being carried away’. The metaphor ‘They toil with …….. anger in their blood’ they are angry because they don’t want to fix the wire because it is dangerous. The wirers are described as ‘clumsy ghosts’ this is because they were hurrying back, tripping over and making noise. The word ghosts means they looked like silhouettes. The alliteration in line ‘Stride thither and thither, whispering, tripped by clutching snare’ the letter ‘t’ emphasises how clumsy they were. The last line has some italic’s in it ‘But we can safely say the front-line wire’s been safely mended’ the ‘we’ is probably the government and generals who really don’t under stand.
