sassoon

In the early 20th century, many poets began to undertake a broad literary movement which was a reaction against the Romanticism of the 19th century, the purpose of which was to depict more realistic situations, rather than the more sentimental aspects of the poems that preceded them. The effects of World War I, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, had a great effect on this “modernist” movement. In Siegfried Sassoon’s “A Working Party,” we can begin to see this modern realism through the use of hard, dry, precise description, traditionally unpoetic language, and the juxtaposition of the personal and universal war experience, as an expression of the poet’s views of the harshness and horror of a world war.

In contrast to Romanticism, which was often characterized by the use of vague language, Sassoon makes use of exact, descriptive verbs in the first stanza, which describes the unnamed soldier walking through the trench. However, Sassoon never uses a word as vague as “walking”; he employs verbs such as “blundered,” “sliding,” “poising,” “groping,” “tripped,” and “lurched.” By using these exact words, Sassoon is able to make a statement on the individual level about the difficulty of life in the trenches of the war. By using “blundered,” the poet is suggesting a difficult journey, one where perhaps he was having trouble getting footing or keeping his balance. This is further suggested with the use of “groping with his boots.” The word “groping” connotes the soldier having no sense of direction in his actions. He does not know where he is going, as if he is completely unaware of what is in front of him; symbolically, this represents the ignorance that the individual soldier has about the future of war, and consequently, his own future. By showing us a soldier who is tripping and lurching along the walls of a damp trench, Sassoon is showing us one aspect of the harshness of the war experience on the personal level.

In addition to his use of exact verbs, Sassoon also employs deliberately unpoetic language as a means of de-romanticizing the war experience. This is seen in the phrase, “Often splashing/Wretchedly where the sludge was ankle-deep.” This is clearly not a poetic-sounding line by the standards of nineteenth century poetry; a Romantic poet would not have seen the word “sludge” as worthy of being used in a poem. It simply is not a pleasant image, and the image of a soldier, another idea that was often Romanticized prior to the twentieth century, trodding through disgusting sludge is not a pleasant image either.