Analyze the themes, symbols, style, and poetic technique in Siegfried Sassoon's "Does it Matter?"

Sassoon's poem begins with a rhetorical question which lends, not only a sarcastic tone to the poem, but also an argumentative proposal:  If it does matter, then people must react to this poem and do something about the absurdity of war.

In the first stanza, with a subtle sarcasm, Sassoon asks if it makes a difference whether someone loses his legs if people will be kind if the soldier appears to not mind when others, alive with activity and hunger, "come in from hunting/To gobble their muffins and eggs." Will it bother the maimed soldier when he cannot be a man? is the subtly persuasive question.

The sarcasm becomes even more prominent in the second stanza as the poet asks if it matters if the soldier loses his eyes when "There is such splendid (ironic word) for the blind;/And people will always be kind (also ironic)."  Then, the acridness of Sassoon's sarcasm becomes apparent as he creates the metaphor in which the maimed soldier is compared to having been reduced to plant-life:

As you sit on the terrace remembering/And turning your face to the light.

Continuing his verse, the poet pointedly asks,

Do they matter, those dreams in the pit?/You can drink and forget and be glad,/And people won't say that you're mad;

With the loss of part of his humanity, the soldier can no longer dream of the future.  In despair, he will drink and lull himself into a state of nothingness, a state in which no one will accuse him of irrational anger towards war:

For they know that you've fought for your country/And no one will worry a bit

Of course, in these last two lines there is bitter irony as Sassoon poses the true irrationality:  People believe that glorious war warrants any sacrifice.  However, the poet's rhetorical question leads the reader to conclude that war is inglorious (THEME) and it is not worth the sacrifice of life or of one's essence.  Man is meant for more that sitting and "turning ...to the light."

What is the mood of Siegfried Sassoon's poem "Does it Matter?"

The poem "Does it Matter?" by Siegfried Sassoon in many ways reflects his own disillusionment with war after his personal experience with trench warfare.  Sassoon was awarded the Military Cross for his heroism, which included saving many wounded soldiers after a raid at Mametz. After he was wounded at the Battle of Arras, he suffered what was then called "shell shock" (which we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder), and became an anti-war activist. The tone of the poem is deeply bitter and sarcastic, displaying his resentment of people who expect badly wounded and maimed soldiers to maintain a cheerful and positive attitude about their injuries. 

In the poem itself, we get an escalating sense of the types of damage war inflicts on soldiers. The first stanza describes a soldier with a missing leg, as people return from engaging in the sports he used to enjoy before his injury; the mood combines regret and resentment. He especially resents the way he is expected to feel grateful for the kindness of the uninjured.

The second stanza describes a soldier who has lost his sight in the war, sitting outdoors and feeling the light he can no longer see. While the mood is not explicitly stated, which is one of the great strengths of the poem, the image of a blind soldier facing the scenery he once loved in what appears to be the setting of a wealthy country house, evokes again both sadness and bitterness, and a sort of rage at the expectation that he should be grateful for other people's kindness, and act cheerful rather than despairing.

The final stanza makes the point that the worst damage is invisible, the mental damage from having experienced the horrors of war:

Do they matter?—those dreams from the pit?...

You can drink and forget and be glad,

And people won’t say that you’re mad;

For they’ll know you’ve fought for your country

And no one will worry a bit.

The bitterness, resentment, and despair deepen in this stanza. The kindness of people towards injured soldiers is viewed almost as a way of avoiding responsibility for having voted for the government that sent them off to war. The narrator especially resents the lack of worry, or moral responsibility, on part of the civilians who think that minor gestures of kindness can somehow absolve them of the burden of guilt for ex-soldiers whose lives have been destroyed. He also, as we can deduce from biographical information, was angry at people who dismissed his anti-war attitudes as the product of PTSD and refused to take him seriously.

How can I analyze the poem "Does it Matter" By Siegfried Sassoon?

In Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “Does It Matter,” he exhibits a strong anti-war message by portraying the difficulties of wounded veterans upon their return from war. His poem expounds on the lack of feelings society has toward the injured soldiers. Throughout the poem, he asks rhetorical questions and uses rhyming lines to emphasize his meaning. He asks whether it is really a problem that a soldier lost his legs because others will treat him with kindness. If a soldier is left blind, that is not a problem because there is employment for the blind and one can still turn their face toward the sun. His words express his feelings about the mistaken attitude of society that a person can just “buck-up” and find a way to be useful in spite of devastating losses from fighting for one’s country. It does not matter if the soldiers’ dreams have died due to their service. “Do they matter-those dreams in the pit?” Sasson even describes how society gives a wounded veterans license to drink to drown their feelings after completing their duties. The satirical poem depicts Sassoon’s deep disillusionment with war and the treatment of its returning heroes.

What is the significance of the title "Does It Matter" in Siegfried Sassoon's poem?

The significance of this poem's title hinges on its historical context: Siegfried Sassoon was one of a number of early twentieth-century writers whose work rose out of their experiences fighting in World War I. In much of Europe, this war created a sense of profound disillusionment with the modern world, both because of the role that modern nationalism had played in sparking the fighting and because modern weaponry had led to an unprecedented and horrific loss of life. On the broadest level, then, Sassoon's question echoes the pervading mood of the postwar era. The "it" in the poem's title is non-specific; although Sassoon goes on to mention several things it could refer to (lost limbs, blindness, etc.), we can also read it as a stand-in for the entire post-WWI world, where nothing seems to matter.

Digging deeper, however, it is clear that Sassoon thinks the war and its effects do matter. The repeated juxtaposition of the somewhat flippant question "does it matter?" with brutal images of war's violence (e.g. "losing your legs") is intentionally jarring; we instinctively feel that something so awful does matter, and we stop short (1). Sassoon further heightens our discomfort by writing in a sing-song (mostly anapestic) meter and employing words that feel trivial, empty, or overly cheerful in context; read against "losing your sight," for instance, the description of the available work as "splendid" comes across as sarcastic (6, 7). The poem's title, then, is bitter and ironic; Sassoon suggests that the things he describes do matter, as much as people would like to explain them away or minimize them as noble, patriotic sacrifices.