Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915)
- Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915)
Charles Hamilton Sorley was born in Aberdeen in 1895 as son of the professor of moral philosophy at Aberdeen University. Sorley was extremely intelligent and won a scholarship to Marlborough College where he was educated, like Siegfried Sassoon, until 1913. During the year of 1913, Sorley decided to spend a year in Schwerin, Germany before taking up a scholarship to study at University College, Cambridge. He stayed in Germany up to the outbreak of World War I. When war was declared, Sorley immediately returned to England and enlisted in the British Army. After several months of training, he arrived at the Western Front in France as a Lieutenant in May 1915, and quickly rose to the rank of Captain at the age of only twenty. Charles Hamilton Sorley was killed in action; he was shot in the head by a sniper at the Battle of Loos on October 13 in 1915. About 122,000 soldiers died in this battle, about 50,000 of those on the British side. Sorley left only 37 complete poems, including “When you see millions of the mouthless dead”, which he wrote just before he was killed and which was found in his kit sent home after his death. Charles Hamilton Sorley is regarded by some as the greatest loss of all the poets killed during the war.
“When you see millions of the mouthless dead”
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, “They are dead.” The add thereto,
“Yet many a better one has died before.”
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.
Interpretation
In this Italian sonnet, which was written while he served in the Great War, Sorley creates a single conceit of the “mouthless” dead. It sounds like a warning to the reader because he uses chilling details like “blind” and “deaf” to cultivate the reader’s senses and to make the image clearer. His image of the dead, who cannot talk anymore, is honest, unsentimental and poignant. He does not glorify death, instead he gives the realistic point of view of a soldier who knows what it means to be confronted each day with the possibility of death. Sorley uses contrasts like “honour” and “it is easy to be dead” to expand his point, that there is, in fact, nothing honorable in dying because one just dies. The dead cannot see or hear anymore; they cannot receive honor or glory anymore; they cannot live anymore. They are just dead. As a soldier at the Western Front he has seen and lived through more terrible things than most of the readers could ever imagine. In order to show the reader the horror of death, Sorley does not have to use emotional details, because in his case, the reality is enough to shock any reader.
Even though Sorley did not survive the war, he is often mentioned with other poets who experienced shell shock and post-traumatic stress disorder. His poetry describes the horrors of the war, the nightmares he has because of his experiences, and most of all the shock of realizing what war and the feeling of omnipresent death can cause in the human mind. Sorley was one of the few poets who wrote about the negativity of war and death even before the war. However, it is reasonable, that he could not foresee the horrors he and the other soldiers would be confronted with. His realistic and unsentimental style and the very somber, almost depressing mood in his last poem make it very clear that he, just like the other soldiers, was not prepared for what awaited him during the war.
Sorley's Early Poetry
The following poem was written before Sorley arrived at the Western Front, just after the outbreak of the war. Sorley had just spent a year in Germany with the people who were now supposed to be the enemy. Even though he was only 19 when he wrote it, the poem shows that he had a very sophisticated and--at that time--uncommon point of view of the war.
To Germany
You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each other's dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.
When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other's truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.