A reading of a classic war poem

'Everyone Sang' is one of Siegfried Sassoon's most popular and widely anthologised poems. The poem was published in 1919, the twelvemonth following the end of the Outset World War, and the celebrating singing that features in the poem has been interpreted as a reference to the Armistice. Yous can read 'Anybody Sang' here.

A few words of summary first, so. 'Everyone Sang' is divided into two stanzas, each of five lines. The stanzas rhyme abcbb. The speaker of the poem hears everyone around suddenly burst into song, and the sound of singing fills him with delight. At that place's a suggestion that this delight is related to a feeling of relief and, indeed, release: he likens it to the feeling a bird that had been caged must feel when it is freed and allowed to fly away.

This is in the first stanza. In the 2d stanza, the images become more cryptic and difficult to analyse, even though they seem at first to be straightforward. The sound of everyone singing is linked to beauty, which itself is likened to a sunset; but what does saying 'And dazzler came' mean?

And what should we make of the fact that just as everyone'due south vocalisation is 'lifted', we are presented with an image of something falling – the setting sun? And we can sympathise the speaker beingness shaken with tears (wracking sobs of joy, for instance) or his heart being shaken, but his heart existence shaken 'with tears' curiously conflates the heart and eyes into a single image, to convey the totality of joy that has overcome him.

It is equally if the speaker is so overwhelmed that he cannot express his delight in straightforward, conventional language. Similarly, note here how the song being sung by 'everyone' is 'wordless', like birdsong. (Birdsong, of course, is the championship of a famous novel virtually the Get-go World State of war, and we might see the sound of singing birds as nature's reminder that the world goes on as e'er, despite the sacrifices being made past thousands of men in the trenches.) The links betwixt singing, birds, and flying/freedom are all woven into a ten-line expression of happiness by Sassoon.

(c) The Fitzwilliam Museum; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
(c) The Fitzwilliam Museum; Supplied past The Public Catalogue Foundation

Indeed, the verse form is called 'Everyone Sang' and at that place is something almost songlike about its utilize of sounds: not only the rhythm and rhyme of the poem, only the internal rhymes ('singing' is echoed by 'Winging' at the start of the fourth line of the showtime stanza, while 'lifted' is echoed by 'Drifted' at the aforementioned point in the 2d stanza).

Note the alliteration on the letter of the alphabet Westward in the fourth line of that first stanza, suggesting the wide-open up expanse of mural that is now the freed bird's domain. Similarly, the final lines of the poem, 'never be washed', offer a strange echo to the first word of the verse form, 'Anybody' (and note how 'never exist washed' is rhymed with 'Everyone' in the poem's final 2 lines).

Only Sassoon probably didn't have the Armistice in mind when he wrote 'Anybody Sang', but rather soldiers singing in the trenches. The poem, and then, is not well-nigh joy that the war is over but rather a temporary and spontaneous desire to sing as a fashion of keeping i'due south spirits up during a fourth dimension of decease, warfare, and uncertainty.

Whether it was intended to be interpreted as such or not, 'Everyone Sang' struck a chord with readers after the stop of the Outset Globe War, because it seemed to capture the mood of exhilarating release felt past everyone following the Armistice.

Well, nigh anybody. One notable detractor was Robert Graves, also a survivor of the trenches, who opined, '"anybody" does not include me.' Only perhaps Graves mistook Sassoon's intention; and 'Everyone Sang' remains one of Sassoon's most popular poems.