[Here, Cohen outlines the three roles that he believes Sassoon has assumed in regard to his poetry, those of "country gentleman," "angry prophet," and "self-effacing hermit. "]

In his conclusion to the Cambridge University Clark Lectures, Robert Graves, while naming the modern writers he considered to be in the "small, clear stream of living" poetry, said he found it "remarkable that the extraordinary five years of Siegfried Sassoon's poetic efflorescence (1917-21) should be utterly forgotten now." At a time when Graves' own autobiography of his wartime experiences, Goodbye To All That, has been reissued, along with Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War and Wilfred Owen's Poems, it is indeed remarkable that Sassoon's poetic achievement during the Great War is now forgotten, and even more remarkable that Sassoon, who has published his poems in every decade of this century, is largely unknown by the present generation and ignored by its critics. Like a decommissioned man-of-war, he rests quietly at anchor in poetry's mothball fleet.

I believe that Sassoon's poetic decommissioning is largely self-determined; that it has resulted from an amalgamation about 1940 of two roles he had played fully to that time, those of angry prophet and country gentleman, into a third role: the self-effacing hermit. This essay seeks to document these roles and to elucidate their development in Sassoon's poetry. Part I is concerned briefly with the origins of the first two roles, while II, III and IV present the poet as angry prophet, country gentleman, and hermit.

I

Sassoon was born in 1886, the second of three sons of Alfred Ezra Sassoon and Theresa Georgina Thornycroft, whose union brought together two distinguished but otherwise disparate British families. On his paternal side the poet came from a clan whose financial exploits and commercial holdings had already become legendary, and whose philosophy of life was a combination of the progressive spirit of the new world marketplace with an old world adherence to the spirit of Orthodox Judaism. Indeed, economic activity and religion were so closely intermeshed that these "Rothschilds of the East," as they came to be known for their financial operations in the Orient, even had their firm's name printed in Hebrew on all their business stationery, at a time when it did not help to advertise commercially one's Jewishness either in the East or the West.

On his maternal side, Sassoon was descended from a family whose artistic accomplishments, whether they were sculpturing or buildings ships for the British fleet, were widely recognized and highly regarded. Their philosophy was also of the old world, but unlike that of the Sassoon's, its motivating spirit was neither economic nor religious, but cultural and social, with the latter predominating. Steeped in the traditions of the landed gentry, Sassoon's maternal forebears emphasized leisurely living, acquiring the social graces, breeding horses and dogs, and hunting foxes.

From these highly diverse ancestral origins, Sassoon has developed two of his three poetic roles. On the one hand, he has delighted in being the stern voice calling the multitudes to account for their wickedness and folly, and predicting their destruction if they failed to heed the warnings around them. On the other hand, Sassoon has seen himself as the gentleman-recorder of his mother's aristocratic, pastoral traditions. In short, he has lived the roles of angry prophet and country gentleman throughout the major part of his poetic career.

II

Sassoon's enthusiasm for his role of angry prophet is amply recorded in his prose accounts of his war experiences, The Memoirs of George Sherston and Siegfried's Journey 1916-1920; but the intensity with which he responded to the role and developed it during the war years and afterward is revealed only in his poems. The prose accounts are of emotions recollected in tranquillity; the war poems are the raw unchecked emotions themselves. In the two dozen or so war poems first collected into The Old Huntsman and Other Poems published in 1917, Sassoon unleashed the exasperation, the horror, the fear, the disillusionment, and the bitter cynicism that came to characterize the poetry of the trenches in the war's last two years. From the brown rats, sucking clay, droning shells, gray weather, rotten boots, sagging wires, cracking rifles, thundering cannon, and riddled corpses, Sassoon abstracted the futility, despair, loneliness and mockery of the war, and with fury thrust it into the faces of his unsuspecting countrymen, safe and snug in England.

His approach was direct and his technique simple: he emphasized and re-emphasized the contrast between the relative comfort and safety of the homefront and the misery and insecurity of the trenches. While the poetic worth of his formula was questionable, its communicative potential was unlimited. Sassoon exploited, without hesitation, the shock value obtained from exposing the superficial optimism of those whom the people set in authority. The bishop in "They" is a typical target:

The Bishop tells us: 'When the boys come back
'They will not be the same; for they have fought
'In a just cause: they lead the last attack
'On Anti-Christ; their comrade's blood has bought
'New right to breed an honourable race,
'They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.'

'We're none of us the same!' the boys reply.
'For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;
'Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;
'And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find
'A chap who's served that hasn't found some change.'
And the Bishop said: "The ways of God are strange!"

In this poem and its companion pieces one finds the requisites of the prophet. Sassoon appears as the enemy of ignorance, complacency, hypocrisy, and sin, the advocate of the poor and oppressed, the leader in social reform. His utterances are enthusiastic and seemingly inspired; his is the voice calling the people away from their wickedness into the paths of truth and righteousness. He possesses something of the mystic whose visions go beyond this world:

I turned in the black ditch, loathing the storm;
A rocket fizzed and burned with blanching flare,
And lit the face of what had been a form
Floundering in mirk. He stood before me there;
I say that he was Christ; stiff in the glare,
And leaning forward from his burdening task,
Both arms supporting it; his eyes on mine
Stared from the woeful head that seemed a mask
Of mortal pain in Hell's unholy shine.

No thorny crown, only a woollen cap
He wore—an English soldier, white and strong,
Who loved his time like any simple chap,
Good days of work and sport and homely song;
Now he has learned that nights are very long,
And dawn a watching of the windowed sky.
But to the end, unjudging, he'll endure
Horror and pain, not uncontent to die
That Lancaster on Lune may stand secure.

He faced me, reeling in his weariness,
Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear.
I say that he was Christ, who wrought to bless
All groping things with freedom bright as air,

And with His mercy washed and made them fair.
Then the flame sank, and all grew black as pitch,
While we began to struggle along the ditch;
And someone flung his burden in the muck,
Mumbling: 'O Christ Almighty, now I'm stuck!'
[The Redeemer]

Moreover, Sassoon's poetry is filled with warnings and predictions, both general and specific, of dire judgments, and of death by fire and sword for those who insist on fighting wars.

With these versified admonitions, Sassoon quickly established his reputation. Like most prophets, he soon became a controversial figure and in many quarters an unpopular one. Indignation began to develop in 1917, and it took only a year to crystallize. For example, when Counter-Attack and Other Poems appeared in 1918, Edmund Gosse, a family friend of the Sassoons, put his gentle affection for the young poet aside and denounced the new verses as "savage, disconcerting silhouettes." But his concern was mainly patriotic; he feared that the sentiments Sassoon expressed would "tend to relax the effort of the struggle" [as related in Gosse's Some Diversions of a Man of Letters, 1919].

Sassoon was also subjected to strong literary censure. A reviewer in The Nation [23, No. 15, July 13, 1918] began an attack on him thus:

It is the fact, not the poetry, of Mr. Sassoon, that is important. When a man is in torment and cries aloud, his cry is incoherent. It has neither weight nor meaning of its own. It is inhuman, and its very inhumanity strikes to the nerve of our hearts…. Mr. Sassoon's verses—they are not poetry—are such a cry. They touch not our imagination, but our sense. We feel not as we do with true poetry or true art that something is, after all, right, but that something is intolerably and irremediably wrong. And, God knows, something is wrong—wrong with Mr. Sassoon, wrong with the world that has made of him the instrument of a discord so jangling.

Nonetheless, Sassoon was encouraged by the public reaction to his war poems in The Old Huntsman despite the unfavorable response to much of it. Certain friends, critical of the government's conduct of the war, like Robert Ross, and outspoken pacifists, like Lady Ottoline Morrell, applauded him. His quickly achieved fame suggested to him that he had developed a new voice more cogent, more powerful, and more significant than any his poetry had known previously. But though fame came quickly, the transition from the provincial sportsman to the angry prophet had been less rapid. It had followed a pattern since discernible in the literary careers of a number of Sassoon's Georgian contemporaries: the writing of patriotic verses in 1914 and 1915 followed by disillusioned and bitter poems from 1916 on. Through most of 1915, the imitators of Rupert Brooke were everywhere apparent, and Sassoon, when he wrote "Absolution" placed himself among them:

The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes
Till Beauty shines in all that we can see.
War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise,
And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.

Horror of wounds and anger at the foe,
And loss of things desired; all these must pass.
We are the happy legion, for we know
Time's but a golden wind that shakes the grass.

There was an hour when we were loth to part
From life we longed to share no less than others.
Now, having claimed this heritage of heart,
What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?

When this poem was composed, Sassoon had not yet been in combat. Following a nine-month tour of duty in France, after which he was invalided home in August, 1916, for severe gastric fever, he began to write of the brutality of modern combat and of the homefront's tragic lack of comprehension of life and death in the trenches. When several of these verses appeared in magazines, he felt that he was justified in telling the truth as it needed to be told, even though the public and members of his own family refused to believe him. Confused by these conflicting attitudes, he remained uncertain of the validity of his position until New Year's Eve, 1916, when he read H. G. Well's Mr. Britling Sees It Through [1916]. There he found a description of the war which helped him to resolve the conflicts and to be assured that his role as prophet was proper for him. The passage read as follows:

It is a war now like any other of the mobbing, manyaimed cataclysms that have shattered empires and devastated the world; it is a war without point, a war that has lost its soul; it has become mere incoherent fighting and destruction, a demonstration in vast and tragic forms of the stupidity and ineffectiveness of our species….

Early in 1917, Sassoon returned to France, with a clear concept of his poetic purpose. Four months of combat, ended by a bullet wound which resulted in his removal again to England, convinced him that not only was Wells right but that for himself some decisive, dramatic act of protest was necessary. Here the confirmed angry prophet in him moved toward a desperate plan. He would refuse to fight again and issue an explanatory proclamation outlining his reasons. The late John Middleton Murry helped him draft the proclamation, and Bertrand Russell subsequently saw that the document found its way to Parliament about the same time as Sassoon's copy to his commanding officer. It read:

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this War should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. 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 insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

For this act of defiance the government decided to incarcerate Sassoon in a mental institution. He was ordered to the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where his therapy was directed by the famed psychologist, W. H. R. Rivers. Much of it consisted of playing golf and writing verses. Sassoon subsequently returned to combat and distinguished himself in action, but he continued to belabor the home front for its lack of imagination, understanding, and sympathy.

It must be recognized, in retrospect, that Sassoon's war poetry suffered from his indulging too much in the role of prophet, for once he decided that it was proper for him, he entered upon the role with so much exuberance that he permanently hurt his reputation as a poet. True, he pleaded effectively for the combatants and just as effectively castigated those whom he held responsible for the suffering of the soldiers. But his verse pleadings and remonstrances reduced his efforts to political propaganda. Though he foresaw and foretold the misery involved in the prolongation of the war, his rash attacks alienated many whom he might otherwise have induced to accept his point of view. Most of all, he lacked the compassion which gave needed balance and restraint to the works of two other poets of the war, then unknown, Wilfred Owen (whom Sassoon discovered while in hospital), and Osbert Sitwell.

A comparison of the war poems of Owen and Sassoon, particularly, will reveal that a strong spirituality underlies the war poems of the former but is lacking in the war poems of the latter. Sassoon is preoccupied with justice and the futility of sacrifice, whereas Owen tempers justice with mercy and describes sacrifice in terms of Christian love. Owen's "At A Calvary Near the Ancre" is typical:

An effective contrast, and one more typical of Sassoon's approach than the previously quoted stanzas from "The Redeemer," is "Stand-to: Good Friday Morning":

Sassoon has himself recognized the absence from his war poems of that spiritual essence which would have engendered pity. While writing in Siegfried's Journey of the poems he composed in the war he observed, "Unconsciously, I was getting nearer to Wilfred Owen's method of approach. (For it was not until two years later [1920] when I edited his poems, that I clearly apprehended the essentially compassionate significance of what he had been communicating)." Yet Sassoon's poems composed in the 1930's when, in my opinion, he reached the fulness of his prophetic powers, remained untempered by compassion in their relentless attack on man's propensity to fight.

When World War I ended, Sassoon continued to write satirical poems, castigating hypocrisy, vanity, and political corruption. His brief flirtation with the Labor Party right after the war provided him with some new material, but he failed to sustain his interest in local politics. He subsequently directed his thrusts mainly at the big-time "rumour breeders," the newspapers, whom he regarded as irresponsible molders of public opinion. His "Lines Written in Anticipation of a London Paper Attaining a Guaranteed Circulation of Ten Million Daily" ends on this pugilistic note:

I damn your circulation as a whole,
And leave you to your twice-ten-million readers
With deep condolence from my lenient soul.

When the war clouds reappeared over Europe and the arms race began that culminated in World War II, Siegfried Sassoon, the angry prophet, spoke once more to the people to warn them of destruction to come, of death to be rained down from the heavens, of cities to be leveled. These prophecies appeared chiefly in two volumes: The Road to Ruin (1933), and Rhymed Ruminations (1940). A typical prophetic utterance occurs in the third and fourth stanzas of "Thoughts in 1932":

Above Stonehenge a drone of engines drew
My gaze; there seven and twenty war-planes flew
Manoeuvering in formation; and the drone
Of that neat-patterned hornet-gang was thrown
Across the golden downland like a blight.

Cities, I thought, will wait them in the night
When airmen, with high-minded motives, fight
To save Futurity. In years to come
Poor panic-stricken hordes will hear that hum
And Fear will be synonymous with Flight.

In The Road to Ruin Sassoon predicted death by fire, gas, and disease. He offered no hope for mankind. He anticipated and elaborated both of the great fears of World War II, chemical and biological warfare. He foretold the development of "super-savage Mammonistic states" and the creation of the "bomb-proof roofed Metropolis", and he deplored "Men's biologic urge to readjust / The Map of Europe." Of course, he was not alone in sounding prophecies and no monopoly is claimed for him here, but he was playing masterfully a role he had determined for himself years before.

In the late 1930's, Sassoon ceased, however, to be comfortable in the role of prophet. By March, 1939, he was sufficiently dissatisfied with it to ignore his having been a political poet, and, in a lecture on poetry exclaim:

Politics and poetry! I must confess that I don't like the sound of it at all. But, as somebody at once reminds me, 'the poet cannot remain a spectator of life.' And 'life—at the present time—is largely concerned with political action. We don't need to be reminded of that—heaven help us!—and I am not here to-night to plague you with the distresses and uncertainties of world affairs.

Sassoon came to the end of the role of prophet in 1940. After World War II broke out, he stopped his warnings and paid as little heed as possible to world affairs. Strangely, when he used the war for a subject, his approach contained none of the earlier prophetic anger. He did not attack the government for misrepresentation or the people at home for indifference. His "Silent Service" is so unlike the poems which made him famous that it is difficult to accept the fact that he composed these lines:

We are impressed, indeed, by the resemblance between this poem and Sassoon's "Absolution" in 1915, quoted above. No longer the prophet, he has become instead an apologist for a government whose policies had long been anathema to him.

The extent to which Sassoon has since moved away from "Politics and Poetry" is clearly indicated by this middle stanza of a recent poem called "Elsewhere":

He, for appeasement of his tortured mind,
Since nothing that one man can think or say
Could prove effective in the feeblest way,
Must look elsewhere to be
Defended and befriended and resigned
And fortified and free.

Like the prophets of antiquity, who sometimes became disillusioned, Sassoon in his old age has thus ceased to be concerned directly with the affairs of this world, and he has begun to contemplate eternity. The prophet in Sassoon has turned into the hermit.

III

Shortly before World War I started, Sassoon began to develop in his poetry the role of country gentleman. Since he did not publish The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, which reveals the presence of this role, until 1917, it was prematurely eclipsed by his immediate acceptance as prophet. Yet Sassoon believed at the time of publication that his long blank-verse title-piece, "The Old Huntsman," was more important than either the war poems or a third section he included, made up of lush romantic lyrics composed between 1908 and 1916. He had written "The Old Huntsman" in deperation in 1915 when he realized that he was nearly thirty years old and had not yet found his own voice. He knew that the romantic lyrics with their distillations of his childhood reveries, filled as they were with goblins, dragons, witches, and other shadowy spirits, were not only inconsequential but lacking in authenticity. In 1913 he had heard, for the first time, his authentic voice when he composed a parody of John Masefield's Everlasting Mercy, called The Daffodil Murderer. This poem, which impersonated a jailed Sussex farmhand awaiting trial for homicide, Sassoon published under the pseudonym of Saul Kain with the help of T. W. H. Crosland. A typical stanza runs:

I thought how in the summer weather
When Bill and me was boys together
We'd often come this way when trudgin'

Out by the brooks to fish for gudgeon.
I thought, when me and Bill are deaders
There'll still be buttercups in medders,
And boys with penny floats and hooks
Catching fish in Laughton brooks.

Two years later Sassoon recognized that the Sussex farmhand was a figure more familiar to him than the ghosts of his childhood dreams, and "The Old Huntsman" began to take shape. The struggling poet found it easy to develop in a lifelike portrait the central figure of this poem just as he had the similar one in the Masefield parody, giving his hero—and here the huntsman is his hero rather than the foot-soldiers of the war poems—an authenticity he had not achieved before. Part of this authenticity comes from allowing the old rustic to develop a series of pastoral images in his simple musings:

Understandably, the war poems in the The Old Huntsman commanded all the attention, and the title-piece was subsequently ignored by the public. Having himself become preoccupied with the war, Sassoon did not return to the themes of hunting and riding to hounds, but nature remained for him a constant source of inspiration. When the war ended and the public tired of refighting its battles, Sassoon was among the first to attempt to revive the Georgian devotion to nature and pastoral sports.

For example, in Counter-Attack and Other Poems one finds a solitary nature poem called "Thrushes." Amid the din and carnage of battle the poet writes of the peaceful flight of the bird thus:

Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim,
Whose voices make the emptiness of light

A windy palace. Quavering from the brim
Of dawn, and bold with song at edge of night.
They clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing
Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof
Whose heart's a haunted woodland whispering;
Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing;
Who hears the cry of God in everything,
And storms the gate of nothingness for proof.

Some thirty years after this poem was published, we find in "Early March" [published in Sequences] that Sassoon is still fascinated by the contrast between the hearty independence of the bird and the "haunted woodland whispering" of the human heart:

Beguilements (which my middle-age can't yet dispel)
Steal into me. Rejuvenescence works its charm.
Designlessly in love with life unlived, I go
Content with the mere fact that fields are drying fast
And tiny beads of bud along the hedge foreshow
The blackthorn winter that will come too late to last.

Beyond that bare untidy orchard, now and then,
One thrush half tells how in the twilight hour he'll sing
To no one but himself his wild belief in spring.

How thoroughgoing Sassoon's attraction to nature has always been is indicated by still a third poem employing the thrush, "Strangeness of Heart," published in 1928. The hold that nature has on the poet, the part that it plays in his entire consciousness, is nowhere more clearly indicated than in these lines;

For one who knew death as intimately as Sassoon did in the trenches, this would seem to be little more than a superficial pose. Yet it was that close association with wholesale human destruction that crystallized for the poet what was of fundamental importance to him: the pleasures of a youth spent in a pastoral setting. Consequently, as he got farther and farther away from the war, he moved ever closer to the re-creation of the rustic wonderland of his mother's country estate. Not only did the Great War ultimately push Sassoon into the past; it disengaged him from the normal activities of a machine-filled world. In 1947 he said in a children's book entitled My First Horse: "The present writer, by the way, is a man of confirmed pre-Machine Age mentality: animals mean a great deal to him: engines do not interest him at all."

Elaborating his point of view more fully, Sassoon, while recalling the riding equipment he owned as a child, went on to say:

In drawing attention to these apparent trivialities, I am reminding the young that it is a mistake to turn up one's nose at the doings of one's age of innocence. Such things have a way of becoming more valuable than the achievements of our maturity. The present is a crowd of confusing voices: the future an unwelcome guest. But the past is an old friend, with whom we can talk comfortably. Middle-age, knocked about by the wear and tear of learning how to get through life, looks back with profound affection for that little radius of unreasoning childhood which had no forebodings. And the fact remains, that human beings are happiest when they get into a private world of their own. For many of us at the present time, the world is much too large and unlocalised, the parish and county boundaries of personal existence are being obliterated. Everything under the sun is explained to us and it is becoming quite difficult to have an independent idea about anything. Horses, however, are essentially unmodernisable and have absolutely refused to move with the times. … [They] are unaware of the enormously expanded range of human activities which make me feel so uncomfortable. For I must confess that I have no desire to travel five hundred miles in a minute, or to scrutinise the Prime Minister of Ruritania on a television screen. Unsuited by temperament to unlimited mobility of mind and body, I am no enthusiast for the conquest of space. Let me add that I have always entertained a positive personal antipathy to the Universe. It is too much for me, and that is all I can say about it.

This forthright statement and the previously quoted poems make further documentation of Sassoon's poetic view of himself as a country gentleman unnecessary. It remains only to be noted that with the publication of each succeeding volume, Sassoon's relationship with nature becomes more individualized, and his poems more personal. Occasionally, this close identity produces a poem of much charm, such as "October Trees" [from Sequences]:

How innocent were these
Trees, that in mist-green May,
Blown by a prospering breeze,
Stood garlanded and gay;
Who now in sundown glow
Of serious colour clad
Confront me with their show
As though resigned and sad.

Trees who unwhispering stand
Umber and bronze and gold,
Pavilioning the land
For one grown tired and old;
Elm, chestnut, beech, and lime,

I am merged in you, who tell
Once more in tones of time
Your foliaged farewell.

At other times, Sassoon sees so little outside of his immediate association with nature that his poems become banal. "Man and Dog" [from Sequences] is a disheartening example:

Who's this—alone with stone and sky?
It's only my old dog and I—
It's only him; it's only me;
Alone with stone and grass and tree.

What share we most—we two together?
Smells, and awareness of the weather.
What is it makes us more than dust?
My trust in him; in me his trust.

Here's anyhow one decent thing
That life to man and dog can bring;
One decent thing, remultiplied
Till earth's last dog and man have died.

Banality is not the only result of individualizing too much one's relationships with nature in a machine-dominated century. To deemphasize the value and the necessity of machines and, more important, of human contacts, in favor of birds, horses, dogs, butterflies, stars, and trees is to invite hermithood. Just as the disillusionment of the unheeded prophet pushed Sassoon toward the role of hermit, so has overindulgence in the role of the country gentleman.

IV

To live the role of the hermit one needs a forest, a cell, a candle, a bed, and an inclination to live alone. In Sequences, which Sassoon published in 1956, he documents his acceptance of hermithood by describing his whole existence in these terms. Moreover, he possesses an appropriately introspective melancholy:

The room, the darkness, and the bed;
Quick ticks the clock, sleep comes not nigh:
A melancholy mind must lie
With troublings of its wakeful head.

But the poet-hermit is no longer troubled with politics like the angry prophet, or concerned with pastoral sports like the country gentleman. His interests are largely metaphysical:

If Nature be indeed our mother,
(Neglectful parent though she seem)
What must remain on my arrival
From earth's anthropocentric dream?

How do you handle my dispersal—
Nameless, unlanguaged, and deminded?
Shall psyche thrive, no more purblinded?
Answer me that, O Universal.

The extensive employment of the apostrophe, as in the last line above, is a further accoutrement of the poethermit. Being alone, he must address someone or something. His apostrophes are directed among others to Christmas bells; the Primordial Cause; time; a star; the mind; and to trees. Yet, the emphasis is almost always on the personal quest for immortality, and Sassoon addresses his own "unscientific selfhood" to "Ask the night sky for intimations of God" His contemplative answer is that of the typical hermit: God exists, but man has a long and difficult journey to travel in order to reach Him:

Nature and knowledge daunt with dire denial
The inward witness and the innocent dream.
On such rough road must faith endure its trial,
Upheld by resolution to redeem
The soul, that world within an ignorant shape
One with the solar system and the ape.

Consequently, for his recent verses, and for his way of life, Sassoon is everywhere regarded today as a hermit. Indeed, he relishes being known as "the hermit of Heytesbury" (the small village in Wiltshire near his estate). The reviewer of Sequences in the Times Literary Supplement [No. 2862, January 4, 1957] begins on this theme and ends on it, but he suggests that the source of Sassoon's hermithood is in his "affinity of temperament" with Henry Vaughan. That affinity exists, but if Sassoon has patterned himself after any one poet, that poet is his early friend and mentor, Thomas Hardy. In Sequences is a poem about Hardy which reads:

Old Mr. Hardy, upright in his chair,
Courteous to visiting acquaintance chatted
With unaloof alertness while he patted
The sheep dog whose society he preferred.
He wore an air of never having heard
That there was much that needed putting right.
Hardy, the Wessex wizard, wasn't there.
Good care was taken to keep him out of sight.

Head propped on hand, he sat with me alone,
Silent, the log fire flickering on his face.
Here was the seer whose words the world had known
Someone had taken Mr. Hardy's place.

If Sassoon's name were substituted for Hardy's and Wessex changed to Heytesbury in these lines, the poem would be as descriptively applicable to the former as it is to the latter. But while Hardy, and Henry Vaughan too, have helped to shape Sassoon into the hermit, the role he plays at present is rather the product of his life experience: the transformation of the angry prophet and the country gentleman into the self-effaced hermit.

In playing all three roles, Sassoon has recorded poetically the crumbling of the old order and the disappearance of a way of life better than the one which replaced it. In this respect, Sassoon is more like Proust than like Vaughan or Hardy. Like Proust, who was also the product of a mixed religious and social union, he has sealed himself off and written compellingly from the bed of his mind, his "remembrance of things past." It is for this achievement, I believe, that Robert Graves is justified in including Sassoon among those in the "small, clear stream of living poetry."