Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
Moloch: anything conceived of as requiring appalling sacrifice
“The Dreamers” uses the sonnet both to experiment with a new, violent form of expression and to stubbornly force the present into the framework of the past.
"Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows."
"The octave’s liberal use of alliteration captures the sense of stopped time on the front...soldiers seemed trapped in a stagnant and nonregenerative world"
OCTAVE: a verse form consisting of eight lines of iambic pentameter (in English)
DIVIDEND: a number to be divided by another number
“They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives./I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats.”
"Sassoon uses the first person at the turn, immediately interrupting the dreamy lyricism of the octave and bringing the violence of the war to poem"
Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.
I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.
“mocked by hopeless longing”
"...the very return to the theme of the octave in the sestet hints at the possibility of the soldier’s return to the old order. The War’s violent diction of dug-outs and rats remains, but its interruption stops short of destroying the structure of the poem as a whole"
SESTET: six lines of poetry forming a stanza
On every side of a war there are two types of people, the soldiers and the spectators. Sassoon is displaying the astonishing disconnect between the two through strong imagery that reveals the complicated nature of war.
We first discover an AA BB rhyme scheme used consistently throughout the poem.
Mood change from stanza 1-2
Crumps- sound that your shoe makes when you walk across snow but it is also the sound of an exploding shell.
“Lice were a never-ending problem, breeding in the seams of filthy clothing and causing men to itch unceasingly.”
Cowed: cause (someone) to submit to one's wishes by intimidation.
Sources:
Kindling eye- People who lived during the war were living with the constant hope of winning it.
Who cheer when soldier lads march by- Soldiers remind these people of a fight that will save their country, not a fight that will kill millions.
"No one spoke of him again."
Since a lot of people died in the trenches they were just forgotten
https://www.diigo.com/user/ejonesedash
1889-1967