Sassoon family

Closure in Lycidas What is the right response to death? How and to what extent should we mourn the ones we love? When John Milton's college friend, Edward King, drowned off of the Welsh coast 1, Milton wrote Lycidas in memoriam. A pastoral elegy, the poem represents King as the lost shepherd Lycidas and uses agricultural imagery to portray loss. The majority of the poem is spent highlighting the irrevocability and completeness of death, that is until lines 165-168: "Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,/For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,/Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor,/So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed..."2 These lines employ metaphors, repetition, alliteration, and a mood and tonal shift to bring closure to readers, showing them that grief does not have to be perpetual. The shift in tone and mood adds a new hope into the poem. Earlier in the poem, Milton used grim and depressing language to grieve mortality and make the readers feel the helplessness of death. Using pathetic fallacy, he described how the whole landscape felt Lycidas's loss, that even "all their echoes mourn[ed]" (2. 11) This environment creates a mood of complete devastation. As we imagine the whole environment bemoaning King's passing, we not only feel it as well, but become surrounded in it. Moreover, throughout the poem, multiple speakers, including Neptune and Camus, lament how this could have happened. The narrator, himself, calls upon the nymphs to demand where they were and…

“Attack”, by Siegfried Sassoon, effectively represents a vivid and graphic view of the apathy of war by divulging into the minds of the soldiers, giving a more personal view to his poem. There are many such instances in which Sassoon’s clever diction. Instead of the norm of authors of his time, Sassoon did not emphasize the dramatics of war during the battle; he accentuated the pre-war stage. Firstly, Sassoon divulges into the fears of the soldiers. He does this by construing a grave scene.…

questioning why you are there fighting a war can be difficult because you do not want your loyalty to be seen as wavering. However, at some point enough can be enough. For Siegfried Sassoon he was able to muster the courage to voice his opinion on the war he was fighting in. The direct audience for his letter was Sassoon’s commanding officer. The letter was published in the Bradford Pioneer as well, so the larger audience would have been the citizens who read the paper. For Sassoon, his purpose…

shell shock victims varied from sympathy or anger at the war to confusion and shame over what was misunderstood as “insanity” arising from within the family” (Scragg 178.) There was a general lack of understanding, and because the war was so romanticized and disillusioned, those who did not witness the horrors of war first…

There were a total of 38 million men fighting in WWI, these men were Russian, German, French, Italian, English, American, Hungarian, Austrian, Bulgarian or from the Ottoman Empire. They all had the same experiences while at war. There were differences depending where they were placed, but the fundamental characteristics were the same. There were a total of 17 million dead and 20 million wounded; the survivors were left to live with the effects of being dehumanized because of all the death they…

I think Rivers’ view of the war did change, I, however, I don’t agree he was ever in favor of the war. He even states he wanted the war to end so he can start research again As I read the text I had the impression that he felt similar to Sassoon but had yet to view protesting the war, even in his thought as an option. The absolute victory over the Germans militarism was cited in the text as the absolute objective of the war but as the war went on than the lines became static, the goal of an…

Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were both soldier as they wrote their poems during the latter half of the war. Written between 1916 and 1918, Sassoon wrote They, to contrast the civilians’ nationalism with the realities of the war. While the Bishop in the poem believe “[the soldiers] will not be the same; for they’ll have fought / in a just cause…” the soldiers turn that statement of nationalism into a statement of horror as they describe the deaths of their fellow comrades . In the…

There is a real sense of urgency and terror, in this poem. Groping along the tunnel, step by step…/ and sniffed the unwholesome air. The images and words that he uses makes you feel as if you are the solider in that tunnel, he allows us to see everything in the tunnel with extreme detail, he even explains how the air feels. Sassoon starts this poem with the verb "groping," he does this to reveal the extreme struggle that soldiers are oppressed with in war. The soldier 's senses are contained;…

his first experience of actual combat at Serre and St. Quentin. He was diagnosed with shell shock and evacuated to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh to undergo treatment. While admitted, he met one of his “literary heroes, Siegfried Sassoon, who provided him with guidance and encouragement to bring his war experiences into his poetry”(“Wilfred Owen: Poet of the Trenches.”). Sassoon introduced him to well-known literary figures such as Robert Graves and H.G. Wells. After a year away, Owen…

War is considered by many to be one of humanity’s central traits as an advancing species and as such it holds a heavy influence on our past, present and future. From warring tribes in Africa during the dawn of man to the great Empires of Greece and Persia warfare has always been present, whether this war is for defense of a homeland and families, to conquest for more power and wealth or freedom from persecution and oppression. These forces drive mankind and have pushed us technologically and…