The First World War, the war to end all wars, stretched from 1914 to 1918 and saw over 60 000 Australian soldiers killed and approximately 150 000 wounded, gassed or taken prisoner. Poetry was an outlet for writers to express their views about the war. It was also a common source of propaganda. The Hero, written in 1918 by Siegfried Sassoon portrays a senior officer informing a soldier’s mother about his recent death. The senior officer speaks gallant lies of the soldier’s death to his mother in attempt to lessen her sorrow. Through the use of both sentimental and hostile diction and irony, Sassoon challenges our notions of heroic sacrifice and constructs a brutal and dehumanizing representation of war as well. Throughout this Speech, I will show how Sassoon’s clear use of structure, irony and diction assists him in his endeavour to privilege this representation.
The poem is written in very clear iambic pentameter. The simplicity of the overall rhyming scheme emphasises the …show more content…
In the first two stanzas his use of terms such as ‘tired’ and ‘poor old’ make the mother out to be fragile and encourage the audience to build sympathy for her and her situation. In contrast, the final stanza incorporates the use of hostile diction, devaluing the soldier. The use of the terms ‘at last he died’ and ‘no one seemed to care’ show how many soldiers were seen not as a person but merely as commodities to be expended in the war and their loss was of no great importance. This represents just how dehumanizing and cruel that the war was. The audience begin to view the office as an ideology of this as despite the sadness of the boy’s death he still speaks of his death as being of no consequence. The final line of the poem is particularly emotive as it shows that no matter how unimportant the soldier’s death was to his comrades; his mother will forever cherish his