Poetry from Anthology

In this essay I will be exploring how the poets expressed their views in a strong and effective way. I shall be writing about three poems.

• Base Details by Siegfried Sassoon

• On the life of man by Walter Raleigh

• Those bastards in their mansions by Simon Armitage

Base Details

Siegfried Sassoon

In this essay I will be describing the contrasts and explore the attitude of the poet in a strong and effective way. This poem is written by Siegfried Sassoon, who was a soldier during the First World War. He used the majors and the soldiers as protagonists of this poem. The poet has described the physical attributes of the majors who would stay at the base, because they were fat, short of breath. Siegfried uses number of abusive and mockery words to describe their behaviour towards one another.

In the beginning of the poem the poet says that he’d live in with the majors at the base. He used abusive and mockery words to describe the physical attributes they posses. The poet says that “Bald”, “short of breath” and “scarlet”. The word “bald” means that they didn’t have any hair on their head, and “short of breath” refers towards their shape and body figure. The lexis” scarlet” has a lot of meanings, but in their case it means that they were guilty. The majors were the main reason for the death of the soldiers. These three words highlight the characteristics of them, as well as it was mentioned in the first two lines of the poem.

Afterwards, Siegfried immediately talks about the soldiers whose fate was inevitably a fateful misery. The author observes the fact that, they were active and they used to get forced towards the frontline. This is evidenced from the poem he states that: - “And speed glum heroes up the line to death”. Nevertheless, since they met their fate bravely and gave their life in the war, this made them a true hero.

Additionally, the poet goes back to the description of the major’s