On Passing The New Menin Gate By Siegfried Sassoon Analysis

In his song "God Bless the U.S.A.," Lee Greenwood sings, "And I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free. And I won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me." These words echo the idea that countries around the world hold soldiers in high regard because they sacrifice on behalf of their countries. War is often romanticized in propaganda, and unfortunately, the actual reality of war is not addressed. Soldiers return home from war, and unfortunately, they never feel like the individuals they pre-war. They bring with from combat images of loss, death, and maimed bodies, which makes readjusting to civilian life a problematic undertaking. Although civilians saw the soldiers that enlisted in World War I as heroes fighting …show more content…
In his poem "On Passing the New Menin Gate," Siegfried Sassoon, an anti-war poet during World War I, reflects on the many soldiers who lost their lives while fighting in the trenches and discusses a new war memorial erected to remember these men. Sassoon states, "Who will remember passing through this Gate, the unheroic dead who feed the guns" (2). Describing the fallen soldiers as unheroic reveals Sassoon's belief that those who died in combat left behind insignificant legacies. Sassoon also expresses that he sees no point in constructing a war memorial because all those that would truly be able to appreciate the sacrifice that it represents are dead. Furthermore, Sassoon describes the soldiers as "doomed, conscripted, [and] unvictorious," which alludes to the idea in All Quiet on the Western Front that the soldiers lost their connection to the innocence of their youth, causing them to become hopeless and demoralized for as long as they had to live. Similar to how the soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front display helplessness in the face of battle, in his poem, Sassoon identifies that those enlisted in the conflict are incapable of escaping the unfortunate outcome of war: emotional instability and death. Sassoon also expresses his anger towards the memorial and those that are honoring the fallen soldiers when he states, "Was ever an immolation so belied as those intolerably nameless names?" (11-12). In this statement, Sassoon refers to the names of thousands of fallen soldiers that are etched onto the memorial, and he expresses that this long list of names on the memorial discredits the great sacrifice that the soldiers made for their country. After all, these soldiers had endured one of the most