Siegfried Sassoon
The Healing Waters of 'The Death Bed'
‘Light many lamps and gather round his bed. Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live. Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet. He's young; he hated war; how should he die when cruel old campaigners win safe through?’
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was an English poet who served in the The Great War. Of all the works which I read during a university course on twentieth century literature last year, I found his war poetry to be among the most lasting and permanent. The Death Bed, written in 1917, was among the most powerful of these works. I will provide the full poem below, and then offer a few of my own thoughts on the text.
He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls; Aqueous like floating rays of amber light, Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep. Silence and safety; and his mortal shore Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death. Someone was holding water to his mouth. He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot The opiate throb and ache that was his wound. Water—calm, sliding green above the weir; Water—a sky-lit alley for his boat, Bird-voiced, and bordered with reflected flowers And shaken hues of summer: drifting down, He dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept. Night, with a gust of wind, was in the ward, Blowing the curtain to a gummering curve. Night. He was blind; he could not see the stars Glinting among the wraiths of wandering cloud; Queer blots of colour, purple, scarlet, green, Flickered and faded in his drowning eyes. Rain—he could hear it rustling through the dark; Fragrance and passionless music woven as one; Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace, Gently and slowly washing life away. He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain Leaped like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs. But someone was beside him; soon he lay Shuddering because that evil thing had passed. And death, who'd stepped toward him, paused and stared. Light many lamps and gather round his bed. Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live. Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet. He's young; he hated war; how should he die When cruel old campaigners win safe through? But death replied: “I choose him.” So he went, And there was silence in the summer night; Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep. Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.
Throughout this poem, Sassoon utilises various images to describe the experience of a soldier who was mortally wounded during the war, now lying in a hospital bed, blinking in and out of consciousness. What I found particularly striking is the poem's abundance of aqueous imagery and metaphors. The dwindling, or fading, of the soldier’s life is represented initially through a cyclical, environmental image, one that melts through spacial barriers. The soldier’s ‘mortal shore’ is being ‘[l]ipped by the inward, moonless waves of death’, an image similar in substance to the ‘moving waters’ of Keats' sonnet, Bright Star (1819)—waters that wash upon ‘earths human shores’ in a healing, ‘priestlike [...] ablution’ (Bright Star, lines 5-6). One feels that a similar ablution is taking place in this field hospital. This poetic connection seems natural, as it is well established that Keats especially had a particular influence upon the English War poets, especially Wilfred Owen.
This oceanic metaphor may seem remote and ethereal, yet Sassoon ensures that its effect bleeds into the ensuing text in visceral and tactile ways. In line eight, this dying soldier swallows a stream of water poured down his throat. The ‘throb and ache that was his wound’ is soothed by the healing draught, as his life is dragged away by Death's foreign tide. ‘Rain’, heard ‘rustling through the dark’ outside of the hospital, ‘soak[s] the woods’ in a ‘trickling peace / Gently and slowly washing life away’, culminating in a type of death-bed baptism. The young man’s thought for water, and its use by the speaker as a kind of symbolic comfort in the soldier’s final agony, is palpable. He thinks on ‘Water—calm, sliding green above the weir’, and again, ‘Water—a sky-lit alley for his boat’. The momentary peace is interrupted, however, in a jarring onslaught of pain and discomfort. He ‘stirred, shifting his body’, causing the pain to ‘[leap] like a prowling beast [which] gripped and tore / His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs’, and he is left, ‘shuddering’, while Death stands ominously over him.
Moments later, ‘many lamps’ are lit around his bed, a luminous image perhaps derived from the ferryman of Hades, Charon, who lights a lantern to cross the River Styx in Greek mythology; or perhaps it is associated with the brightness of the Christian Heaven. Through this aqueous imagery, culminating in the warmth of a salvific light, Sassoon, I think, presents this journey of death as essentially one of healing and transformation, in spite of the injustice of the cause, of the war. Death, for Sassoon, is a necessary part of life, though here it has been unnecessarily foisted upon the young by ‘cruel old campaigners’. In the final lines, this liminal moment is disrupted by ‘the thudding of the guns’, a persistent reminder, to all those present, that they too may meet the same end. But in this moment, Death looks to the dying soldier, and says, ‘I choose him.’
Remindful of the song/poem, 'The Band Played Waltzing Matilda'. Very powerful as well.
I get goosebumps from the last stanza! Absolutey love Sassoon, my favourite poem of his is 'Microcosmos'— which I highly recommend if you haven't read already!