Siegfried Sassoon is what we call a war hero, known for his bravery, but at some point Sassoon turned against the war, and considered it pointless and badly managed. Sassoon was also a poet, he wrote poems in response to World War I. Between 1915-1917 Sassoon wrote a poem called “The Hero” which shows his disappointment with the war. Here Sassoon portrays the pain of the families left behind, with the mothers pain of her son's death, by an officer delivering a consolatory letter to a woman in the beginning of the poem. The officer is lying to her about how her son died, so she would be at peace with her son's death. Sassoon also portrays the fear associated with fighting in war, through the dead son Jack in this poem.
Discussion
The title “The Hero” would make the reader assume that the poem is about to praise soldiers and their bravery and courage. But the poem is written with a lot of irony, such as the title is. In the poem a mother is praising her son, and his bravery as he died, fed by lies from the military and government.
The first sentence of the poem highlights Sassoons thoughts on one of the main issues with the war: “Jack fell as he´d have wished” This sentence portrays the delusion in the world, on what a soldier wants and wishes for. Society believing in soldiers wanting to die in war, makes the parents send their sons off to serve blindly to the violence and the danger on the front line. However Sassoon propose that the officer in the poem was not comfortable with lying, when he wrote “coughed and mumbled” in relation to the officer telling the lies. Sassoon shows how he thinks that maybe not all military people were happy lying to the soldiers' relations.
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