On passing the Menin Gate
Siegfried Sassoon is at various sites described as the most innocent poet of wars ever. He was born and he grew up in a Jewish family. As he was an innocent, his reactions on the war and the military planning were bitter and violent. He wasn’t only violent in the way he wrote, but also on the battlefield. He even earned the nickname “Mad Jack” because of his near-suicidal exploits against the German lines.
Sassoon is a key figure in the study of the poetry of the
Great War: he brought the idyllic pastoral background with him to the war; he began by writing war poetry reminiscent of Rupert Brooke (known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War).
He mingled with such war poets as Robert Graves (wrote grave poems) and Edmund
Blunden (poet, author and critic, good friend of Sassoon) ; he spoke out publicly against the war (and yet returned to it); he influenced and mentored the then unknown Wilfred Owen
(shocking, realistic war poetry - he was also a soldier-) ; he spent thirty years reflecting on the war through his memoirs; and at last he found peace in his religious faith. Some critics found his later poetry lacking in comparison to his war poems.
On passing the new Menin Gate
The poem is written to all civilians of the world who are interested in the World War. He starts accusing the reader and the civilians by immediately questioning. He wrote the poem after returning from the War. He began writing the poem in Brussels in 1927 and finished it in 1928 in England.
The tone of this poet is one of disgust and contempt.
What immediately strikes you are the sound patterns and rhyme schemes built into the poem. There is:
Alliteration: "Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone"
Internal Rhyme: "The unheroic Dead who fed..."
Assonance: "Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime"
These create harsh sounds that demonstrate Sassoon's anger - the Ps make it sound like he's spitting his words out.
Like we said before, Sassoon starts by questioning the reader directly "Who will remember, passing through this Gate / the unheroic dead...?" This rhetoric style accuses the reader, and all civilians, of neglecting to properly honour the "Dead". He mourns the fact that there is
Chiel Buseyne, Elise Jacob
5LMT
War & Poetry

On passing the Menin Gate nobody to "absolve" the men - i.e. they cannot be given a proper Christian burial because they are missing.
He suggests that the "Sepulchre of crime" (the gate) actually degrades the missing men, whose memory is reduced to "nameless names" (If you go to the Menin Gate or other memorials, you'll see what Sassoon means - there are so many names that individuality is erased and the names are meaningless).
The Gate is criminal because of the hypocrisy practised by the authorities who have built it:
'"Their name liveth forever", the gateway claims'. The use of the word 'claims' and later
'belied' tells us that the Gate represents false honour and mourning. This is contrasted by imagery of the Dead, who "endured that sullen swamp" and "struggled in the slime". A common feature of Sassoon's poetry is this - he uses vile images to shock the public or the authorities in this case, who he believes to be 'complacent' and ignorant of the suffering of the troops.
Bearing in mind that the poem is written in the aftermath of war, it is not as vicious as other works by Sassoon (To The Warmongers etc), but for me it still shows the scars left on exsoldiers, whose sacrifice, they felt, went unpaid and unrecognized.
This is a nice summary we found on a website and we learned much of it. I don’t think there is something to adapt on this summary.
Themes
1. Death
Sassoon is writing a poem about the unnecessary death of sixty thousand soldiers in the battle of Ypres in 1917. He is angry at the fact that these soldiers ‘fed’ the guns with their lives. They died as a result of poor military planning. Their deaths were horrible, ‘foul’. These soldiers were ‘doomed’ or condemned to death from the moment they were forced or tricked into joining the army. Twice Sassoon refers in the poem to the ‘Dead’. Sassoon thinks the monument was built as a sort of tomb, ‘sepulchre’, to their memory.
2. Betrayal
Sassoon feels that the war leaders betrayed the ordinary soldier. Their ending was ‘foul’, rather than heroic as often claimed. The monument ‘belied’ or used their deaths in a false way to glorify British government or British history. From the start they were betrayed as they were ‘conscripted’: they were forced or tricked into joining the army. But their life was one of brief endurance of horror in a ‘sullen swamp’. Sassoon sums up their lives as soldiers as a struggle in ‘the slime’. This is not as grand and heroic as the monument would like their relatives to think. Sassoon feels so angry at the betrayal that he imagines the dead soldiers rising up in revolt against the false monument. He concludes with the angry image that the monument is a crime against the memory of the dead.
3. Propaganda and Lies
Sassoon uses three rhetorical questions to suggest that the monument is based on lies.
Sassoon regarded the idea of a monument to remember dead heroes as a lie. As an experienced officer he felt the soldiers did not choose to die heroic deaths. In Sassoon’s mind the monument suggests that sixty thousand dead heroes were satisfied to die proudly
Chiel Buseyne, Elise Jacob
5LMT
War & Poetry

On passing the Menin Gate for their country. Sassoon regards this as official propaganda, a false picture put out by officials. Sassoon declares that the names inscribed on the monument ‘belied’ or told a romantic untruth about the unnecessary sacrifice of the dead soldiers. The words ‘pile’,
‘sullen swamp’ and ‘slime’ show the reality behind the lie of the claim ‘Their name liveth forever’. The vast list of names make each listed name anonymous. No individual name is distinguished enough from the list to live on in anyone’s memory. By contrast the second and second last lines refer to the so-called immortal soldiers as ‘The Dead’. Sassoon disputes the lie that their names live ‘forever’. Sassoon concludes that this attempt to remember and honour the dead soldiers is a crime.
4. Memory
The poem attacks the false way brutally killed soldiers are remembered as if they were heroes who were happy to die for their country. Officially the state remembers them with
‘pomp’. In reality they died ‘unvictorious’, ‘unheroic’, and as ‘nameless’ men without individual graves.
Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, -
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride
'Their name liveth for evermore' the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
 Siegfried Sassoon
Our meaning about this poem is that it really has a content that is not presented more beautiful than it actually is.
Sources: http://www.skoool.ie/skoool/examcentre_sc.asp?id=4739 http://www.firstworldwar.com/poetsandprose/sassoon.htm
http://www.ww1westernfront.gov.au/nl-be/menin-gate/last-post.html
http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=90483 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon
Chiel Buseyne, Elise Jacob
5LMT
War & Poetry