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
