Suicide in the Trenches by Siegfried Sassoon

 

Credit: Life on The Seventh Cloud and Foto Cordero

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark.

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In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

-----------------

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

This poem is very straightforward about its content. It tells us about a boy who could have been anyone: where he was, what happened to him, and then, at the end, a warning.

Usually, poems and texts about war speak about heroism, goodbyes, Country, patriotism, sacrifice, and pride. Sassoon does something very different. He shows us an ordinary young soldier, describes how the war destroys him, and then turns directly toward the people at home who celebrate the war.

The poem has 3 parts:

1. Before the war, there was an ordinary boy 

2. The trenches destroy that simple world

3. People need to face the reality: YOU

We are reading about a soldier boy, not a hero, not a special man, not the patriot we should all look up to. He is alive, enjoying the simple things that surround him. The second part is the cold and raw reality of the war, the soldiers and what desperation looks like. No heroes, no cheering, no fireworks, just a bullet through his brain, the sound of a gunshot. Finally Sasson, Sassoon wants to talk directly to the readers, the ones who are alive, the ones who cheered when the "lads" marched off to war, but these people didn't face death, coldness, hunger, and fear.

There is also an important historical context surrounding suicide and military service. During the First World War, suicide and other forms of psychological collapse could carry enormous stigma, and the way a soldier's death was classified and treated depended on the circumstances and the military authorities involved. We should therefore be cautious about treating every wartime suicide as having been handled in exactly the same way.

The first and final parts of the poem are so closely connected. The boy begins with laughter and a carefree relationship with life. The trenches take that away. 

I believe Sassoon must have been angry; he is saying that he saw what the people were cheering for. How frustrating, to say the least,  must have seen young lads trying to escape, trying to find a way out of the hell of war, but no one understands; they just want to punish them.

What happens when a society sends young men into hell, celebrates them as they leave, and then looks away from what happens to them there?

 

Siegfried Sassoon

The Silence of Grief ( Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

 

Frederick Elwell’s work, The Wedding Dress (1911). 

The previous painting was created 10 years after the Victorian era officially ended. Yet in many ways, Victorian society did not simply disappear with the end of Queen Victoria's reign. After 40 years living under a monarch who was deeply associated with mourning, propriety, and traditions, many Victorian customs remained deeply rooted in British society long afterward.

 The Queen was an important and the most influential public figure of her time; royal life had long been observed the public and chronicled. Monarchs often became cultural compasses, influencing everything from fashion and etiquette to social behavior and, in Victoria’s case, mourning.  Her public mourning reinforced the idea of how a widow should dress, behave, and publicly express or contain her grief.. This is why many customs associated with the Victorian era survived beyond the period itself and eventually became traditions.

Read more about Victorian customs: Here

GRIEF

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 

 I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless; 

 That only men incredulous of despair, 

 Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air 

 Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access 

 Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness, 

 In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare 

 Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare 

 Of the absolute heavens. 

Deep-hearted man, express Grief for thy dead in silence like to death 

— Most like a monumental statue set 

 In everlasting watch and moveless woe 

 Till itself crumble to the dust beneath. 

 Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet: 

 If it could weep, it could arise and go.

A young woman wearing a veil and black clothing mourning at a tombstone, with her dog attending on he by C. Hancock, 1836.

What does grief look like when it has nothing left to say?

Psychology has developed multiple models, and modern grief research generally does not consider grief a fixed sequence that everyone passes through. The American Psychological Association explicitly says there is no “normal” timeline and that people should not expect to pass through grief in progressive stages.

The famous 5 stages by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Denial — “This can't be happening.”

Anger — “Why is this happening?”

Bargaining — “If only…” / “Please, God, if you could just…”

Depression — confronting the reality and pain of the loss.

Acceptance — beginning to acknowledge and live with the reality.

They were developed by Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and published in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. Importantly, however, Kübler-Ross originally developed the model from interviews with terminally ill patients, describing their responses to their own impending death. It was subsequently applied much more broadly to bereavement and other losses.

And this is crucial: they were never meant to be a universal five-step recipe for grieving. The APA describes the model as nonlinear: stages can overlap, recur, or occur in a different order. 

When Dreams Become Memories of the Dead Part I

 

"I dream of you, to wake" is the third sonnet in Christina Rossetti's Monna Innominata, a group of sonnets about love, separation and longing ( one of my toxic hobbies ). Monna Innominata roughly means Unnamed Lady. This sonnet describes a person who dreams of a beloved; she experiences a lovely reunion with him in her sleep, only to wake to find him gone. Of course, this means that the dream is more beautiful than anything experienced in real life; waking up means realizing loneliness and the loss of this beloved person.  Another thing to think about is that, in this case, death could be sweeter than real life.  

Has that ever happened to you ? When I was still going to high school, from time to time, I used to dream about strangers, people who wanted to reach out, but even if I had never seen them before, it felt sad; it felt like I made a connection and then I would wake up and they were gone, never to be seen again. Now, some people in my life have crossed over to the other side, and yes, I have seen them, especially in the first couple of months. The dream was sweeter and waking up used to hurt, but somehow I had to believe they are with me. Even if I can't see them, I am sure I will post more about this. 

"I dream of you, to wake"

By Christina Rossetti

I dream of you, to wake: would that I might

Dream of you and not wake but slumber on;

Nor find with dreams the dear companion gone,

As, Summer ended, Summer birds take flight.

In happy dreams I hold you full in night.

I blush again who waking look so wan;

Brighter than sunniest day that ever shone,

In happy dreams your smile makes day of night.

Thus for in dreams I may comes to your side,

And love you without measure, without fear,

And know that you are mine, and I am yours.

Ah, brief delight! The morning comes so fast,

And waking brings the cold light of the day,

Where I must live without you, as before.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Dream Within a Dream,” published in 1849, is a meditation on the painful realization that nothing in life can truly be held onto—not time, not hope, memories, love, or even life itself. The poem begins with the speaker saying goodbye to someone and questioning whether his entire existence has been nothing more than a dream. This uncertainty becomes more powerful in the second stanza, where he stands on a shore trying desperately to hold grains of sand as they slip through his fingers and disappear into the sea. The sand can be read as a symbol of time.

I think Poe is showing what the realization of losing feels like. Seems the character is trying to hold on to time, maybe existence, memories, love, etc but it all is already slipping away with every hour and every day.

A Dream Within a Dream

by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow —

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone? 

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand —

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep — while I weep!

O God! Can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

I Am! by John Clare: The Poem of Identity, Loneliness & Mental Illness

 

   I Am! - John Clare 

I am - yet what I am, none cares or knows; 

My friends forsake me like a memory lost: 

I am the self-consumer of my woes —  

They rise and vanish in oblivion's host, 

Like shadows in love frenzied stifled throes 

And yet I am, and live — like vapours tost 

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, 

Into the living sea of waking dreams, 

Where there is neither sense of life or joys, 

But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteem; 

Even the dearest that I love best 

Are strange — nay, rather, stranger than the rest. 

I long for scenes where man hath never trod 

A place where woman never smiled or wept 

There to abide with my Creator God, 

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, 

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie 

The grass below, above, the vaulted sky.

Click here to go to album page 1 and here to album page 2

In "I Am!", John Clare explores the profound loneliness of feeling invisible, misunderstood, and disconnected from both society and himself. The poem expresses the anguish of existing in a world where one's identity seems forgotten, while longing for peace beyond suffering. Drawing from his own experiences of mental illness, isolation, and personal loss, Clare reflects on the fragility of human identity and the emotional burden of alienation. Yet, amid its sorrow, the poem also reveals a quiet yearning for spiritual comfort and a return to the innocence and tranquility of childhood, making "I Am!" one of the most moving meditations on identity, solitude, and the universal search for belonging in English Romantic poetry.

John Clare (1793–1864) was an English Romantic poet often celebrated as the "Peasant Poet" for his vivid, deeply empathetic depictions of rural life, nature, and the changing English countryside. Born to poor agricultural laborers in Northamptonshire, Clare achieved sudden literary acclaim in 1820 with his debut collection. However, as public interest in pastoral poetry waned, he sank into severe poverty, financial distress, and psychological illness. Struggling to support his large family alongside his fading career and the physical destruction of his beloved childhood landscapes by parliamentary enclosure, Clare suffered a severe breakdown characterized by deep depression, anxiety, and vivid delusions at times, even believing he was Lord Byron or Shakespeare.

It was within the walls of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (later renamed St Andrew's Hospital) that Clare wrote his masterpiece, "I Am!". Composed around late 1844 or 1845—just a few years into his 23-year stay at the institution—the poem was born out of profound isolation and alienation from his family, friends, and the literary world. Despite his fractured state of mind, Clare retained periods of extraordinary creative clarity; he dictated or wrote out his poems, which were then transcribed and preserved by W. F. Knight, the asylum’s sympathetic house steward who encouraged his writing between 1845 and 1850. First published in the Bedford Times in 1848, the poem serves as Clare's definitive statement on human existence, capturing the tragic contradiction of being physically alive and self-aware while feeling entirely abandoned and forgotten by the world.

From: My Poetic Side

The rest of his days were spent in this institution and he died in 1864, aged 71.  He is buried in Helpston churchyard, the village where he grew up and his poetry is commemorated every year by children of the John Clare Primary School who honour him every summer on the 13^th of July- the date of his birth.