A CONVERT POET : Siegfried Sassoon

An Appreciation by Neville Braybrooke
MR. SIEGFRIED SAS-1 SOON. the 71-year-old poet and author, who was received into the Church at Downside last month, is the subject of an appreciation by Mr. Neville Braybrooke, which we give below : MR. SIEGFRIED SASSOON'S recent conversion to Catholicism will not come as a surprise to those that have read his books over the past thirty years. A good hater often makes a good believer—and poems of such superb bitterness as " The General " or " To Any Dead Officer " are sure of a place in any future anthology devoted to War.
I remember first reading his poems in an anti-tank training camp in the Shropshire Hills.
0 Jesus, send me a wound today,
And Fit believe in Your bread and wine.
he year was 1943. and the sentiments with which the poet had invested his first World War soldier had not elated so much as
• altered. After 1939 it was difficult to know on whom precisely to lay the blame; with the increase in mechanization soldiers condemned a nameless They. In Mr. Sassoon's Fourteen-Eighteen poem called 'They' he shoots directly at the bishops and field-marshals; the Established Church and War Office of England become one and the same thing in his eyes.
Yet this is only one aspect of his work. There is also his beautifully lucid prose, his memoirs of a fox-hunting man and infantry officer. " 1 have always been inclined to accept life in the form which it has imposed itself upon
— and herein lies the key to the ageless quality that nangs over his best writing. There has never been a sealing off of experience and his latest volume of poems.
"Sequences" (when it appeared this spring) showed not so much a re-fashioning of past material, but the opening up of new themes since the poet in his sixties was facing different horizons to those which he had seen forty years ago on the Hindenburg Line. Old soldiers never die . but perhaps it is truer to say that it is really the poet who remembers that today is not the same as yesterday who never dies. In the meantime may the seventies prove as fruitful as the decades before them.