Siegfried Sassoon's "Suicide in the Trenches": A Close Reading
This essay offers a close reading of Siegfried Sassoon's World War I poem "Suicide in the Trenches," analyzing how the poet uses diction, structure, and shock to expose the suffering of young soldiers and the willful ignorance of civilian society. Drawing on Sassoon's own experience as a soldier, the essay traces the poem's movement from a simple portrait of a young man to a devastating portrayal of despair and suicide in the trenches. It also examines the poem's regular rhyme scheme as a structural metaphor for the ordered but hollow lives of citizens at home, and identifies a central moral critique: that society sacrifices its soldiers while refusing to acknowledge the cost.
- Introduction: Sassoon's Wartime Context: Sassoon's biography and satirical wartime poetry
- The Opening Stanza: Youth and Innocence: Diction establishes the soldier's youth and simplicity
- The Second Stanza: Plunge into Despair: Sudden shift to trench horror and depression
- Climax and Society's Reaction: Suicide and society's silence as a double shock
- The Final Stanza: Hypocrisy and Dichotomy: Crowds' knowing hypocrisy and war's theft of youth
- Structure as Meaning: Rhyme scheme mirrors order, chaos, and social emptiness
- Conclusion: The Real Shock of the Poem: Society's indifference is the poem's true horror
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay moves systematically through the poem stanza by stanza, grounding each analytical claim in specific words and images from the text.
- It identifies and develops several layered dichotomies — youth/age, joy/despair, structure/chaos — that build toward a coherent thematic argument about wartime society.
- The discussion of poetic structure (the rhyme scheme as marching and as social order) demonstrates how form and content are read together rather than separately.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates close reading: the practice of using specific textual evidence — individual word choices, line breaks, and structural patterns — to support interpretive claims. Rather than paraphrasing the poem broadly, the writer pauses on single words like "cowed," "glum," and "smug-faced" and unpacks how each contributes to the poem's larger argument about suffering and hypocrisy.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with biographical and historical context, then proceeds stanza by stanza through the poem before stepping back to consider the poem's overall structure and thematic synthesis. It closes with a reflection on the poem's lasting emotional impact and a restatement of its central moral indictment. This stanza-by-stanza scaffold is a reliable organizational approach for short-poem analysis papers at the undergraduate level.
Introduction: Sassoon's Wartime Context
"Suicide in the Trenches" by Siegfried Sassoon addresses the problems young men encountered during the First World War. Ironically, society hailed the broken spirits of these boys as heroes while ignoring the deeper-lying problems they brought home with them — if indeed they returned at all. In the poem, Sassoon uses the shock of suicide to describe the extent of the horrors suffered during the war. According to most commentators, the poem can be interpreted quite literally, particularly if Sassoon's life experience at the time is taken into account.
Siegfried Sassoon was himself a soldier during the First World War (Minguez). The suffering he encountered, along with his conviction that the officials in power were doing everything possible to perpetuate the war while remaining oblivious to that suffering, inspired the poet to write satirically on these issues. "Suicide in the Trenches" is one such poem.
The Opening Stanza: Youth and Innocence
The work begins quite simply, with the image of a soldier boy. The poet uses diction to imply the soldier's young age: the phrase "empty joy" in the second line, for example, indicates that the boy is not yet mature enough to experience anything as truly meaningful or fulfilling. The fact that he "sleeps soundly" and "whistled early" also indicates a simple and optimistic nature. There is little in the first stanza to prepare the reader for the shock that follows. The words "empty" and "lonesome" are the only indicators that conditions are not quite as desirable as they might first appear.
The Second Stanza: Plunge into Despair
The second stanza is a very sudden plunge into negativity, which maximizes the shock effect. The "empty joy" is now replaced by a young soldier in "winter trenches." He is no longer joyful, even in an empty way — he is afraid ("cowed") and depressed ("glum") by the terrible conditions in the trenches.
According to Lois G. Gordon (57), these conditions were so prevalent that the trenches became a kind of "home" for the soldiers. This observation connects well with the idea of their youth; they are desolate, alone, and surrounded by others equally desolate and lonely. It is little wonder that being forced to make a home in such conditions — so far removed from the loving, clean homes they had known — would cause depression. In only a few words, the second stanza manages to convey the full extent of the horror the young protagonist suffered. These lines provide an appropriate introduction to the shock that is to follow.
References
Campbell, Patrick. Siegfried Sassoon: A Study of War Poetry. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 1999.
Gomez Minguez, Sandra. "Suicide in the Trenches." 2006. Retrieved from http://mural.uv.es/sangomin/Sassoon.html
Gordon, Lois G. Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
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