'The Hero' af Siegfried Sassoon, digtanalyse

The poem “the Hero” is written by Siegfried Sassoon. It’s about a woman who just had lost her beloved son, Jack, in war. The war Jack died in has probably been World War I, since the poem first appeared in print in 1917. The white-haired old woman thinks her son died a noble death as a brave soldier, but she has been told some gallant lies from the Brother Officer. The true story about Jack is that, he was a cold-footed, useless swine who only would be missed by his old mother. A real weakling, who panicked that night, the mine, went up at Wicked Corner.The theme of the poem is in my opinion faith in our beloved. This credulous mother believes in her son so much and loves him so much that she can’t see all his mistakes. She knows nothing about the cold-footed useless swine he really is. But one of the themes is, telling people what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. If the white-haired old mother was told about what a pig her son really is years ago, then maybe she would have had a chance to change his way of behaving. She would have been devastated if the noble guy from the Brother Officer would have told her what she needed to hear, that’s why he didn’t tell her, he made her happy for the rest of her days. You can clearly see that the text is old, the way and style Sassoon wrote the poem is very old-fashion. An example of the old-fashion style is that the second stanza has a lot of intelligent words. Sassoon are using sentences like “gallant lies”, ”nourish all her days”, “brimmed with joy” and “Glorious boy” if Sassoon had replaced these phrases with terms like “Some lies”, “make her last days happy”, “delighted” and “her boy”, then the poem wouldn’t generate inner pictures and cause developing of feelings, which makes us decide who’s side we are on. The writer can develop feelings inside us using positive and negative words, and the more intelligent and direct the words is, the easier it is to generate curtain feelings in us readers.