Trench Duty

Siegfried Sassoon poem, Trench Duty, is an extremely visual and harsh account of a soldier during his time during warfare. More specifically, he shows the brave account of trench warfare. The soldier's explanation of the war itself is extremely dark as Sassoon portrays combat as something brutal, savage, and unsettling. The stanza begins with “ shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake” and throughout the entirety of the poem the soldier explains how he set out for the trench and battled. The first line in itself is intense, as the just the words "shaken" numbed" scarce" are actions that many disturbing. As the poem continues, it is almost as if the reader can follow the actions of the soldier as there is "rumbling and bumping" throughout the night or when he is "crawling on his belly through the wire." I find it interesting how Sassoon chose to create the poem in a way as though it was a story, just merely written down in a book. The rhyming scheme— aabbccddefefgg— is a unique way to present the story as it almost seems more intense as each line is building up to the next. Without this rhyming scheme, it would just be a story, flat, without certain emphasis on the soldier's experience. The ending, "Blank stars. I’m wide-awake; and some chap’s dead” is extremely powerful as the author contrast a man who is wide-awake with one who is no longer a week. It is clear that Sassoon is emphasizing the idea that one may never know who is coming out alive and who may die in an instant. In this case, our narrator is alive, but this idea represents the essence of war, that some soldiers will never get to see such "blank stars" ever again. This poem was extremely dark, as I feel the writer wished to show that trench duty is not desired since a soldier faces death at any moment.