[1030] Everyone Sang

Guest poem sent in by "Dave, Hash" <IMCEAEX-_O=LLOYDS+5FUDT_OU=LLOYDS+5FUDT+5FUK_CN=BOURNEMOUTH+20EXCHANGE+20CLIENTS_CN=PCHDA@>

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

   -- Siegfried Sassoon

      April 1919

The poem speaks to me of a deeper, underlying reality - the closing lines
bring that into focus for me. Given what I know of Sassoon's war-service in
France during WW1 (he was a contemporary of Wilfred Owen) I'm torn between
deciding what drove him to write it - was it the idea of a dying serviceman
surrounded by the horror of war who hears a song, as if birds flying out of
sight, and the horror drops away as he realises the song never ends? Or was
it his love of nature, the wider, realer world that he saw as he wrote this
poem - realer and more deep than the man-made hell that he had witnessed and
fought in?

The one thing the poem has without a doubt - hope. The song will never end.

Hash

Links:

  Biography of Sassoon: http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/

  Sassoon poems on Minstrels:
     Poem #385, Base Details
     Poem # 535, The Working Party