In what ways does Siegfried Sassoon make the experience of being in the trenches a vivid and realistic one?.
Siegfried Sassoon's poem The Rear Guard encompasses various poetic techniques which gives this poem a realistic approach of the experience of being in the trenches through a soldier's perspective, who forms the basis of the poem.
Sassoon shapes the idea that the solider is unable to see clearly by using carefully placed punctuation. "Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes to vague to know" tell us that he is using a torch as suggested in stanza number one and is acknowledging every item that appears in the beam of his torch because of the commas that appear after every discovery but is still unable to recognize anything else as its is so dark in the trench.
The Rear Guard contains numerous poetic devices, one of which is onomatopoeia. "Tripping, he grabbed the wall" is an example of Onomatopoeia as "tripping" further suggests the lack of visibility in the trenches as the soldier is having difficulty in reaching his destination without stumbling in the dark.
"Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore agony dying hard ten days before" is an example of the poet's use of imagery in the poem. Imagery provides the main frame of the poetic techniques used to make the experience of being in the trenches a vivid and realistic one as Sassoon tries to build the reader to respond to the poem. Sassoon uses highly descriptive, emotive and suggestive words to reveal some of the horror in the poem. These words shape the meaning through the tone and mood of the poem, "livid", "fists of fingers", "blackening wound". .
The overall feeling of war is compared to that of Dante's view of hell which is the soldier's view of it too therefore the horror mood which reflects a hellish type place.
