Attack Essay

â€Å"Attack† is a poem written in 1917 by Siegfried Sassoon while he was convalescing from his wounds in a hospital in Scotland. He was a soldier who fought in the First World War. Attack is a short, 13-line poem written in speech rhythm with some rhyme. The poem is described in a very vivid way which makes the reader think that the author himself witnessed the scene. The poem begins with the poet describing the setting of the poem. The landscape is in a battlefield where there are still remains of previous battles. The poet pictures it in a way that makes the scene very menacing and uncomfortable. The poem goes on with the soldiers fighting in the attack with their hopes struggling in the midst of war. Sassoon then ends the poem with an impassioned plea, â€Å"O Jesus, make in stop! † One major technique that the author uses in order to convey of the horror of the battlefield and what it seemed to be like to be in an attack is literal and figurative imageries. Examples of literal images are â€Å"the ridge emerges†, â€Å"bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear†, â€Å"lines of grey, muttering faces†. The poet uses very striking diction that makes the poem sounds more uncomfortable, for example, â€Å"scarred slope†. The colour of the atmosphere is described as dun and wild purple which accentuates on the menacing atmosphere of the setting. The verbs at the beginning of the poem are very significant as they seem to be particularly strong in this poem, like the description of the tank â€Å"creep and topple† over the ridge, the barrage that â€Å"roars and lifts† or the men who â€Å"jostle and climb to†, etc. On the other hand, the poet also uses a lot of figurative images. These figurative images include: â€Å"time ticks blank and busy on their wrists†, â€Å"and hope, with furtive eyes, †¦ , flounders in mud†, etc. These images help to personify and emphasize the meaning of the poem, for example, in line 11: â€Å"While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists† The figurative image here delivers the meaning of the soldiers while fighting in the attack, are not aware of the time and how it ticks blankly and busily on their wrists. These two adjectives creates an alliteration that further emphasizes the meaning of how the soldiers are just spending meaningless time on the battlefield, forgetting who they are and what they do. Furthermore, the same kind of hopelessness is caught by the image of the time ticks blank and busy. This idea is brought out to us more clearly by the two last lines of the poem. Hope is personified as something with furtive eyes and grappling fists that flounders in mud, as if to compare it to the soldiers. The short statement, â€Å"flounders in mud† is also mentioning the solders falling down and dying in the attack. The impassioned plea at the end by the author seems to have a great effect on the readers as it shows the emotions and how sincerely the poet wants everything of this to stop. The mood of this poem if mostly menacing to the readers, it somehow makes us sympathize for the soldiers. Seeing the images of the attack, it also seems to have an emotive effect on the readers. The punctuations in the poem also help the poem to create a bigger effect of this. In many lines, a caesura is used to make the previous sentence emphasized and creates suspense as well as having a greater effect on the readers. Overall, Siegfried Sassoon has showed through the poem Attack shows how the soldiers have to go to the battlefield to fight on the lands of previous battles, having time ticking through and as they fall down, their hope also flounders, leaving them with their faces muttered, their fists grappling†¦