“Glory of Women” by Siegfried Sassoo: Analysis and Summary

Glory of Women, by Siegfried Sassoon, is an Italian sonnet with an rhyming pattern. In general, the poet addresses women and uses juxtaposition- what the women think war is and what it really is. This poem is very sarcastic. It marks the beginning of anti-women literature. Men resented the fact that they had to fight in the war, while the women could stay home and pretend that everything was the same as it always had been. At home, life went on like there was no war going on. When soldiers would come home on the weekends they could not understand how life seemed so unaffected. They were out in the trenches everyday killing and dying.

When they came home they were expected to act like the chivalrous gentlemen that they were before the war, but they had a hard time being that man because they had seen too much evil. The women, on the other hand, romanticized war and thought that the soldiers have been in chivalric places as they have been brave.

That is why the poet condemns women who wait at home while the men fight and die.

“You make us shells”, in WWI, many women were recruited to munition factories and provided the equipment of death that kind of let the war continue.he poet sarcastically says that women praised the effort of the soldiers in the war and encouraged them to fight only to grieve over them when they die.They did not seem to understand the reality of the war and were often disappointed by the soldiers who were running away. What is more, while women were concerning themselves with the frivolities of life, men were dying in the mud.

Their bodies no longer discernible; they became just another dead body on a large field of dead bodies, while women got to sit at home knitting. At the end of the poem, the poet is sympathetic talking about the German soldier whose face goes deeper in the mud. He sympathizes with the German soldiers, the enemies, because they understood the English soldiers, unlike the women who sat at home unable to understand anything.