Glory of Women – Analysis

Glory of Women is a poem about how blinded women are by the

supposed honor and glory of war. They are ignorant of the hardships
and pain that all men at war have to go through, instead seeing only
the fame that they believe results afterwards.
The persona in this poem is the author, Siegfried Sassoon. He
speaks as a soldier who has experienced sufferings of war to all
women in general, who stay at home, fantasizing about their
husbands’, sons’, fathers’, and any other men in their lives for their
bravery in participating in the war.
This poem is written in an Italian (Petrachan) sonnet form, with a
rhyme scheme of A B A B C D C D E F G E F G. It has a rhythm of
Iambic Pentameter, which contains ten syllables per line, and read
stressed, unstressed, stressed, unstressed, etc. There aren’t a lot of
techniques used in this poem; but many different cases of
alliteration is used; for example, “heroes, home” in line one and
“blind with blood” in line eleven.
Strong imagery is used to emphasize how terrible war is. Lines
eleven and fourteen give gruesome pictures of the aftermaths of
war, “trampling the terrible corpses – blind with blood,” and “his
face is trodden deeper into the mud.” This is done because the poet
wants the reader to have a clear mental image of how grisly war is,
and also remember what it results in. Using blood and corpses to
paint images had a strong effect on stressing the brutality of war.
Glory of Women conveys its message very well because of the
ways the poet words his topic. The beginning octave describes
women and their actions, thoughts, and feelings about men at war.
Sassoon tells of how women love men that are heroes, how they
take delight in hearing dangerous war experiences, how they crown
a man for his acts of bravery, and how women mourn the memories
of those who perished in the war. Then the poet proceeds in the
following sestet to inform women of what they had never thought of:
that war itself is not about honor and glory; in the end, what it really
comes down to is pain, loss, and most often of all, death.
Siegfried Sassoon displays his feelings towards war very
strongly in this poem. His tone is very obviously bitter and angry
about the fact that women don’t realize all the difficulties men have
to endure to survive war. He resents how no one felt the need to
change their opinion and educate them about war. This leads to the
theme being how women are unaware of the harsh realities of war.
Because of this, Sassoon wrote this poem both to teach and to mock
women for their ignorance. This is also reflected in the title of the
poem, Glory of Women, which is greatly significant because
although glory generally refers to someone or something’s reason
for pride, the poet uses this word and twists its meaning to indicate
sarcasm.
The mood of this poem is one of bitterness. The poet tried to put
his feelings into the poem and spread his opinions through it. After
reading Glory of Women, I felt that I could sympathize with Sassoon,
because he was so strongly set against war, but during his time, not
many people shared his views. It also makes the reader thoughtful,
because Sassoon’s message in this poem is very stereotypical,
stating that all women think in one way, but that was not always
true. I think this poem is very effective because it changes its tone
between the octave and the sestet, from speaking of the good
opinions women have of war, to how wrong women are in not
realizing how terrible war really is.