Our class was given "Base Heights" by Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). Thinking back to our sonnet lecture and presentations, I remember the word 'base' meaning not just an army base, but also meaning of little to no value. (My group analyzed Sonnet #33 and this form of base was utilized by William Shakespeare). That catch made the rest of the poem more meaningful because of the play on words. For our assignment, we needed to choose one poetic device to convey the speaker's attitude. In order to appeal to the satirical form of this poem, I have chosen to analyze the use of irony. Yes, this may seem basic, but I need to learn how to analyze from a very standard device.
The speaker, most likely a fellow soldier, begins this poem off by wishing he was of higher command. The irony automatically starts in line 3 when Sassoon writes, "And speed glum heroes up the line to death." The first thing that popped into my mind was to get the miserable soldiers out of the eat first because they are sad and want to die anyways. Oops. However, I thought more into it and it's very ironic how lines 5, 6, 7, and 8 state, "Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,/Reading the Roll of Honour. 'Poor young chap,'/ I'd say-"I used to know his father well;/ Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap.'" That's when it clicked. These men do not care about the fighting soldiers. They literally could not care less about who these men were that they were sending to fight. Ironically enough, in conjunction with line 3, they are sending these weak, amateur soldiers out while they are sitting in their hotel room with the most experience in the field. And that is where the criticism arises. Sassoon uses irony as a euphemism to make readers laugh and thinking their own what they laughed about. This irony then conveys the idea that the military does not care about their soldiers and who they are putting on the front line. All they care about is how many more drinks they are going to guzzle down.
Even though I am no the best at analyzing, I'd like to think this was an okay first time. We analyzed a bunch of sonnets, but they have a certain structure and form to look for and you will basically be all set. With this kind of poetry, I have no idea what is going on, just 10 lines of Siegfried Sassoon writing eloquently. It was actually kind of fun determining what
this means. Or maybe I'm just trying to make it sound better to convince myself to push through. Who knows. Until next time!
EG
