The Hero by Siegfried Sassoon Summary

Summary and Analysis

“The Hero,” by the English poet Sigfried Sassoon (1886-1967), is one of the many notable lyrics Sassoon wrote in response to World War I. Sassoon himself was a war hero, known for his unusual bravery, but eventually he turned against the conflict which he came to consider as pointless and badly managed. This poem reflects his disillusionment with the war.

Like much of Sassoon’s poetry, this work is written in a simple, clear, straightforward style. As the opening line suggests, the poem uses the kind of language actually spoken by “real” human beings. It employs no lofty rhetoric or exotic phrasing; neither of those would be appropriate to its subject matter. Instead, the tone is colloquial and familiar. The mother refers to her son as “Jack,” using his nickname rather than his probable formal name (“John”).

The first three lines of the poem use a very regular “iambic” meter, in which odd syllables are unaccented and even syllables are stressed. Iambic meter is so often used in English poetry because it is thought to be closest to the actual rhythms of normal, everyday speech. It is an appropriate rhythm, then, for Sassoon to have chosen for this poem.

The fact that the word “Mother” is capitalized (1) is significant in several ways. In the first place, the word is used as an honorific title, a term reflecting the speaker’s respect for this particular woman. In addition, this mother is in some ways an archetypal “Mother”—less an individual than the representative of all the many millions of mothers who lost sons in this especially bloody and horrific war. Her reaction is probably similar to the reactions of many mothers who heard the unwelcome news of their sons’ deaths. Women of her time and place had been brought up to be patriotic and to respect authority, and so it would have been very unlikely that such mothers would have protested against the war or doubted the truthfulness of official reports. This mother accepts her son’s death with stoic pride and even admires how nicely “The Colonel” writes (3).

Part of the purpose of Sassoon’s own poem, however, is to produce writing far different from the platitudinous, dishonest writing of the colonel, with its white lies and comforting equivocations. The colonel does not want to upset this particular mother by telling her the painful truth about how her son died, but Sassoon himself wants to make sure that his own readers understand that World War I is not a glorious affair. He also wants them to know that often they are being lied to by military authorities and government officials.

Having established a regular iambic beat in the first three lines, Sassoon is now able to depart from that metrical pattern in ways that will...

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