My 2018 editorial from 'The Sorrow' which is a beautiful collectable issue of The Linnet's Wings and would make someone a lovely gift of words and images.
On “Everyone Sang”: Editorial by Oonah V Joslin
Everyone Sang
by Siegfried Sassoon
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.
Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
Has it ever happened to you? A spontaneous combustion of song? It has to me and I have never forgotten the wonder of that experience. We were a family of singers, and maybe that’s part of why love this poem. But as I became more familiar with it, I was struck more and more by an essence it embodies. I’ll call it ‘birdness’.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, it was an accustomed thing that communal singing took place. The men in the trenches would have sung around a piano at home or in the pub, sung marching songs in training, and popular songs like Pack Up Your Troubles and of course hymns in church. Church attendance was high. Belief in God and Country walked hand in hand. It was only natural then, they should sing to lift their spirits and Siegfried Sassoon would have been familiar with this so:
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
probably really happened at some point. On the face of it, this is a simple statement of joy, and the poem reads almost as an armistice celebration taking place on the battlefield, but it is not that. “Everyone Sang” is dated 12/4/19.
On 13 July 1918, Sassoon was wounded by friendly fire near Arras. As a result, he spent the remainder of the war in England. The poem plays to an audience of people celebrating the end of the war and a return to normal life but there is something much rarer, more poignant, more telling in this poem.
Before the war he led a fairly privileged life. He left Cambridge without a degree. He had a small private income. He liked to write poetry. In A Mystic as Soldier he says:
I
lived my days apart,
Dreaming
fair songs for God;
not of God but for God, mind you. He believed in God and Country and took his beliefs as seriously as any other. The war changed all that. It made him question what happened to ‘love thine enemy’ (Matt 5).
Now
God is in the strife,
And
I must seek Him there,
Where
death outnumbers life,
And
fury smites the air.
Men on all sides were fighting, killing each other for God and Country and that didn’t make sense. In Siegfried Sassoon’s Diaries 1915-1918 he asks:
“The agony of France! The agony of Austria-Hungary and Germany! Are not those equal before God?”
By now he’d served at The Somme, seen men mown down, witnessed the carnage on both sides, lost his brother and a best friend to this war. We see him sometimes tread a fine line between prayer and blasphemy in To Any Dead Officer and again in Attack:
O Christ when will it stop?
O, Jesus make it stop!
Siegfried Sassoon was a good soldier – rather reckless in fact. He was decorated for bravery. Yet Sassoon ended up questioning everything he had been brought up to believe in. This was slaughter on the grand scale, sanctioned by church and state, and he could not reconcile it, and it pained him. Being an officer he dared not speak of this. It would have demoralised the men and he cared deeply about the men. He expresses this frustration in the third stanza of Mystic as a Soldier:
I
walk the secret way
With
anger in my brain.
That anger eventually burst forth when he published his very open protest in The Times newspaper July 1917 which was subsequently read out in parliament.
“I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.”
“I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insecurities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.”
Sassoon was aware of the consequences of an officer issuing this statement. True, he had been encouraged in this by Bertrand Russell and the Bloomsbury set but he was not a pacifist and he was no coward. At this point he felt he could no longer be silent and for this he might face court martial and pay the ultimate penalty. His friend and fellow poet, Robert Graves intervened to save his skin, persuading the authorities that Sassoon was suffering from shell shock, and so he was sent to Craiglockhart Castle near Edinburgh for ‘treatment’ in the hope that, after a period of reflection, he might be persuaded to retract. He was not suffering from shell shock. However in that place he was surrounded by many men who were. Many suffered from severe speech impediments or mutism due to the condition. These were men who, through extreme trauma, had lost the ability to communicate or voice their distress. They literally had been silenced by horror. Their fears had been rendered wordless. It was ironic that Sassoon faced the stark choice, in this setting, to stand by his statement and take the consequences, or to affirm that he was suffering from a mental condition, censor himself and his protest, and return to active service, seemingly cured. It was made clear to him by psychiatrist Dr Rivers, whom he admired, that neither of these courses would be of benefit to the troops on whose behalf he’d lodged the protest. Either way he would be silenced. This and the thought of skipping out of a battle, made him question his own motives.
It was ironic too that it was whilst at Craiglockhart he met Wilfred Owen and they became friends. Sassoon became his mentor and encouraged him in his poetry and in many ways gave us one of the greatest voices of all the war poets. Owen went back to active duty and so did he. Though he still thought it futile, he very much wished to acquit himself well in this war. When Owen was killed Sassoon tirelessly promoted his work.
Another irony is that it was only through Wilfred Owen that I for one, came to Siegfried Sassoon. How many other voices were silenced forever by that war? We’ll never know.
The final line of Mystic as Soldier says:
O
music through my clay,
When
will you sound again?
‘through my clay’ has interesting sociological and religious connotations. For many war dead there would be no grave. They were lost in the field. How could they then ‘rise again’ according to Christian belief? After that war, attitudes towards cremation drastically changed. The logic could not be tolerated that men who fought for their country would be lost forever to God!
Sassoon answers his question at last, in Everyone Sang. He said that the poem ‘came to him’ and certainly Graves and others didn’t regard it as very good poetry, perhaps a little naive. But when a poem ‘comes’ to a poet, it doesn’t just appear out of a blank page and a blank mind. It comes from somewhere deep within and is informed by an evolved sensibility of expression. It is honed by experience. In this case the essence of birdness began in the innocence and birdsong of his Kent childhood (you can trace birds and music through many of his poems) and culminated post war, in this sudden chorus, a release of all the sorrow, joy and passionate anger brought on by such waste of life. It is a poem about making voices heard.
First of all the song lifts his spirits:
I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly
Here were men who longed to fly away, home to their loved ones, away from danger, sickening fear and the horrors of war. They were caught up in a situation they could not escape. Death was a release. The landscape of ‘white orchards’ like Eden and ‘dark fields’ Sassoon speaks of is reminiscent of his childhood Kent, but here it emblematic. Heaven was home and the battlefields were darker than Hell. In death this struggle between light and dark is left behind and so in the song, which lifts the spirits of the living and raises the dead. One can almost see a vast host of souls soaring together heavenward:
on - on - and out of sight
still singing.
Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
The military day ends with the bugle call, Sunset also known as Retreat. In the trenches there was little respite, or sleep even at night and Sassoon was known for his night raids. They all longed for rest and the final retreat. When Sassoon writes,
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away …
despite the punctuation here, as a page poem one sees tears; and horror on the same line and it echoes his 1917 statement: I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops. For no good reason, they had drifted into war and now seemingly drifted out of it.
Sassoon came from an anglo-catholic and Jewish background. He was familiar with the bird as sacrifice. And when he says:
O, but Everyone
Was a bird;
He truly means ‘Everyone’ which is why he uses a capital letter. Men on all sides had been sacrificed in, in his opinion, an ‘evil and unjust’ war and he asks:
“Did Christ not die for these as well?”
the living and the dead, Irish, Scots, Welsh and English, French, Indian, Belgian, Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, German...
and the song was wordless;
of course. Which language would represent them all? How could the dead speak? How could those who’d lost the ability to speak be heard? What language can describe the horrors of that war? Many who served never spoke of it to anyone. Language is wholly inadequate. The song must be wordless. But he says:
the singing will never be done.
I don’t think it’s just the heavenly choir, Sassoon refers to here though that is certainly there. To sing like a bird also means telling it like it is.
Sassoon had been effectively gagged by the war office in 1917 and now that the war was at an end, he thought the truth would out! History would examine the causes and outcomes of that war. The horror and suffering would be revealed and never be forgotten. He made sure Wilfred Owen was not forgotten. Of course Siegfried Sassoon was delighted that the war was over but he was also eager that Everyone should now be heard so he gave them all a voice in Everyone Sang. Out of the birdness, after all has been swept away, rises this poem, a symbol of peace, a beacon of freedom, a protest against futility. And yes, that war brought about sea-changes in society and in religion but 100 years on, I think there is still little criticism of the conduct of that war, the 'political errors' of which Sassoon wrote, nor acknowledgement of the pity of it. Four years ago a rash of programmes were aired about beginning of WW1 but since then they’ve all gone quiet. WW11 seems to have taken precedence. Best not to dwell on the futility and carnage, I suspect -- lest we remember. This was a politician's war and had nothing to do with the people who did the fighting and dying but the establishment always closes ranks to maintain power. One will always need people who are prepared to fight.
In November this year all the so called great and good will show up, sombrely attired, at the cenotaph but with no apology on their lips for those who died unnecessarily and brutally one hundred years ago in a cause that was not their own. No anti-war poems will be read. There will be no thought for those who, for the rest of their lives, saw before their waking eyes, the dismembered and dead. Who will bend an ear for the silenced voices? Will there be sorrow for the spinsters and widows made or the unborn of a generation of craftsmen, doctors, artists and poets unmade? No. It will be a celebration of patriotic duty. And
“The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori”
that Owen and Sassoon and many others so hated, will be perpetuated. The establishment is as it ever was, willing to sacrifice people to its own ends whilst we... we twitter, we tweet but do we sing? Siegfried Sassoon was fond of this poem that ‘came to him’ in April 1917. He read it out often. It came from a place inside him, deep as death. It sprang from a well of profound and long held melancholy and horror and it sang “through his clay”. How could it do otherwise? And if anyone reads it aloud this November, mistaking it for what it is not, it will be because Siegfried Sassoon was a clever man and a great poet and I will smile and say:
Siegfried, this one’s for you.
Oonah
I would like to thank James Graham for his helpful comments and input to this editorial.
I found “Siegfried Sassoon A BIOGRAPHY” Max Egremont (2005) Picador: ISBN 978-1-4472-4328-1 very useful in providing background information for this essay.
BUY THE SORROW
