The Full Text of “Attack”
1At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
2In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun,
3Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
4The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,
5Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
6The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed
7With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
8Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.
9Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,
10They leave their trenches, going over the top,
11While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
12And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
13Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!
The Full Text of “Attack”
1At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
2In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun,
3Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
4The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,
5Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
6The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed
7With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
8Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.
9Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,
10They leave their trenches, going over the top,
11While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
12And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
13Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!
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“Attack” Introduction
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"Attack" is a poem by British poet and World War I soldier Siegfried Sassoon, first published in his 1918 collection Counter-Attack and Other Poems. The poem offers a bleak and unflinching look at the horrors of combat, making no attempt to mythologize its subject or create a sense of heroism. It describes the moment when soldiers, following the order to "attack," go over the trenches and into the line of enemy fire. This often resulted in a catastrophic loss of life with marginal gains in territory. In its final words, the poem makes a plea to "Jesus" to "make it stop!"
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“Attack” Summary
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In the morning, the top of the trenches appears. It is earthy and grey-brown under the strange purple sunshine, which burns through the smoke that covers the frightening and misshapen hill. Tanks appear, one after the other, tentatively and awkwardly moving towards the barbed wire. The artillery guns fire noisily. After this, men, bent under the weight of all the weapons and equipment they are carrying, start pushing and climbing towards the battle, most likely to be hit in a flail of bullets. Rows of pale faces, mumbling and full of fear, leave the trenches by climbing over the top. On their wristwatches, time ticks away busily and unknowingly. Hope, with darting eyes and flailing fists, struggles in the mud. Jesus, please let it end soon!
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“Attack” Themes
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The Horrors of War
“Attack” aims to convey the horror, suffering, and sheer senselessness of war before ending on a simple and dramatic plea—to “make it stop!” Written by Siegfried Sassoon—who served as a soldier in World War I—the poem shows the devastating effects of such conflicts on the young men involved, and is, of course, partly based on Sassoon’s own experiences. The poem builds a sense of absurdity that seems to question the purpose of war in the first place, suggesting that it's not only horrific, but also fundamentally meaningless.
The young men in the poem fight in what feels like an almost alien landscape. This heightens the sense that these soldiers are a long way from home, but also suggests that this conflict is far removed from what the speaker sees as normal human behavior. In other words, it’s as though the soldiers are in some alternate, absurd reality where, for instance, the “sun” is “purple” (perhaps because of the way it shines through the smoke from ammunition). Even the tanks—normally a symbol of the fearsome power of war—seem kind of clumsy here. They “creep and topple forward” towards enemy lines, highlighting the haphazardness of armed conflict—and heightening the poem’s overall sense of warfare as being totally absurd.
The soldiers, too, take on this clumsiness, which stands for a kind of meaninglessness and lack of purpose. They are made heavy by the weapons and tools that they have to carry because of the war, turning these men into easy targets. This highlights the way that the First World War was a horrible kind of numbers game: technology had advanced humankind’s methods of killing, and the only way to conduct warfare was to throw men into “the bristling fire.”
As the poem depicts soldiers going over the trenches to most likely meet their deaths, it uses two key instances of personification. Time ticks “busy” on the men’s wristwatches, indicating the frantic and chaotic reality of war. But time is also “blank”—indifferent, unknowing, and unfeeling—about what is happening. Time is a kind of witness to the war, in the sense that these events will mark themselves deeply into time as history. However, time is incapable of understanding the events themselves. This might represent the inability of political leaders to grasp the true horrors of life on the battlefield).
Hope—the other personified figure in the poem—is like one of the soldiers itself. It senses that it is in danger, fighting desperately like a soldier with “furtive eyes and grappling fists.” Hope, “flounder[ing] in the mud,” is itself dying. Sassoon seems to be highlighting the devastating consequences of war that go well beyond the immediate conflict; this line suggests that war destroys humanity’s hope more generally, in addition to harming the specific men involved.
All in all, then, it’s understandable that the speaker of the poem, who himself seems to be a witness to the fighting, pleads with “Jesus” to “make it stop.” But the reference to “Jesus” doesn’t introduce any sense of hope into the poem, instead highlighting the huge gulf between the promises of religion—peace, community, joy and so on—and the absurd horror of what the speaker (and the reader) witnesses on the battlefield.
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Nature and Warfare
“Attack” depicts a desperate world in which humanity's technological advances have outgrown humanity's ability to keep the use of these technologies in check. This gruesome machinery of warfare has a devastating effect on the landscape where the soldiers fight. The poem, then, subtly suggests that wars don't just harm the people who fight in them, but that they harm the environment in which they're fought, too. War makes humanity less connected to the world in which it lives, the poem argues; it metaphorically transforms the planet into a kind of threatening and alienating place, rather than a more familiar and comforting home.
The poem opens with “dawn.” Normally, dawn is associated with beauty and new beginnings: the birds singing their songs, dew on the grass, the brightness of the morning sun, and so on. The natural world is also often associated with paradise and humankind’s natural state (such as in the Garden of Eden in the Bible)—one that has been lost. But this dawn instead shines on an uncanny and barely recognizable world. The “ridge” in the earth is a browny-grey corpse color (“dun”). The sun is not its usual shade, but “wild” (an adjective that indicates a kind of widespread savagery) and “purple.” This might be because the sun is shining through the lingering smoke of fired weapons and bombs, and the description highlights that things are not as they are meant to be.
The strange colors and general atmosphere also speak to the way humankind alienates itself from its own world through warfare. Indeed, instead of morning mist to accompany the dawn there are only “spouts of drifting smoke” from weaponry. Such is the pain and evil of warfare that the “slope” now appears “menacing” and “scarred”—as though it seeks some kind of revenge for the injuries inflicted on it. Again, this speaks to a breakdown in the relationship between humanity and the world in which it lives.
In the poem’s closing moments, it again refers to something more natural—the “mud” in which the personified “hope” now helplessly “flounders.” This is a subtle shift in focus back to the earth, reminding the reader that war gravely affects the natural world as well as the people who actually fight. Perhaps more widely this aimlessness of hope suggests the collective failure of humanity’s imagination: rather than conceiving of the earth as a communal home, different nations go to war with one another, causing untold damage to both themselves and the land.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Attack”
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Lines 1-4
At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun,
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope;Siegfried Sassoon’s “Attack” is a kind of subversive take on an aubade—a poem written to celebrate and evoke the morning. Of course, this is no happy scene, but the heart of a battle in the First World War (in which Sassoon himself served). Up until the caesura in line 4, the poem focuses entirely on the landscape in which the battle takes place. There are, at this early stage, no soldiers in sight (though the “ridge” and “spouts of drifting smoke” hint at what is taking place).
This section, then, is like the establishing shot of a movie. Sassoon is keen to evoke not just the senselessness of war and its grotesque waste of human life, but also something of its weirdness. These lines conjure an almost alien landscape, where the ground is “massed and dun” (wedged-together and grey) and the “glow’ring sun” is a “wild purple” color.
The consonance and alliteration in these first two lines instinctively evoke a landscape, but it’s as though something is not quite right, and the place is not as it seems:
At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun,The tight organization in the sounds of these lines is deliberately obvious, perhaps mimicking a more typical poetic discussion of some beautiful scene: a flourishing field, maybe, or a coast. But purple is a distinctly unusual color for the sun, "wild" purple even more so. This might actually be more literal than it first appears, relating to the odd hue that sunlight takes on when shining through smoke such as that emitted by guns, grenades, and tank-fire. The “emerge[nce]” of the “ridge”—which is the top of the trench over which most men will meet their death or serious injury—mirrors the way that the men too will have to emerge into the heat of the battle, once the order is given.
Lines 3 and 4 continue on from the first two, describing the smoke that drifts over and through the battle scene. The alliteration and consonance are intense and obvious, showing the way that the smoke dominates the landscape:
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slopeThe /s/ and /sh/ sounds here (also known as sibilance) fill the line as though hiding the other letters, conveying the smoke’s effect on the surrounding environment.
Line 4 characterizes the “slope” as both “menacing” and “scarred.” Both of these words can be interpreted as personification, with "menacing" representing the aggression and bloodlust of war, and "scarred" relating to injury and pain. In a literal sense, these opening lines highlight the effect that warfare has on the earth itself, pushing the poem’s scope beyond a sole focus on the human cost. But in making the landscape feel uncanny and almost like an alien planet, it reminds the reader of the far-reaching global effects of the First World War, the way that war can turn a comforting home—the entirety of the Earth, even—into an unfamiliar world.
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Lines 4-6
and, one by one,
Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
The barrage roars and lifts. -
Lines 6-8
Then, clumsily bowed
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire. -
Lines 9-11
Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, -
Lines 12-13
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!
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“Attack” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration is a key feature of "Attack." It is first used in the very first line, with the shared /d/ of "dawn" and "dun." Though these words are far apart, the similar consonant /n/ sound makes the alliteration helps more prominent, so that the words actually half rhyme. The alliteration here works as a kind of contrast: "dawn" is often, in poems at least, a visually beautiful time of day. But the poem's first color is "dun"—which is a kind of brown-grey. This hints at the way that war has had (and continues to have) an adverse effect on the natural environment.
Alliteration is then an obvious feature of lines 3-4. These /s/ sounds—also known as sibilance—evoke the smoky battlefield. They dominate the line, preventing the chance for other sounds to appear (mimicking the concealing effect of the smoke):
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope;The alliteration of /b/ sounds across lines 6 and 7 ("barrage," "bowed," and "bombs") has a loudness to it that suggests the noisiness of the battlefield, with bombs falling all around. Later, in line 9, there is a kind of double alliteration:
Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear
These repeated sounds create a sense of numerousness to match the anonymous mass of soldiers going "over the top."
Finally, line 11 uses alliterating /t/ sounds to suggest the sound of a ticking clock or watch: "time ticks." This is intentionally very close to the usual way of depicting a clock's sound: tick tock.
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Apostrophe
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Personification
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Polysyndeton
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"Attack" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- The Ridge
- Massed
- Dun
- Glow'ring
- Smouldering
- Spouts
- Shroud
- The Wire
- Barrage
- Jostle
- Bristling
- Furtive
- Grappling
- Flounder
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This is the top of the trenches, over which the soldiers have to go to engage the enemy.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Attack”
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Form
At first glance, "Attack" looks like a sonnet. Indeed, a number of the famous First World War poems are sonnets (Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth," for example). This poem has a similar look on the page. Like a sonnet, it's rhymed and written in iambic pentameter.
On closer look, however, the poem consists of 13 lines—rather than the 14 that usually make a sonnet. The poem, then, doesn't line up neatly with the sonnet form. Perhaps this is a deliberate attempt by Sassoon to wrong-foot the reader: to say, these are the real horrors of war, and in this instance they do not fit into a neat poetic form.
Overall, the poem follows a kind of zooming-in trajectory. The first four lines are like an establishing shot in a film. Then, tanks and artillery appear, followed by the hapless men hampered by their equipment. Finally, they have to go over the top and into the line of fire. The poem pleads aimlessly with Jesus at the end, clarifying the pure sentiment behind the poem: "make it stop."
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Meter
By and large, "Attack" is a poem written in iambic pentameter. These are lines of five stresses, with each stress consisting of an unstressed-stressed pattern (da DUM). The first line is a good example of this steady-sounding meter:
At dawn | the ridge | emer- | ges massed | and dun
But just as it fails to conform to the sonnet structure—with 13, rather than 14 lines—the poem also disrupts the regularity of the iambic pentameter. This is a way of making the meter evoke the chaos and unpredictability of warfare.
The meter is disrupted as early as the second line:
In the wi- | ld pur- | ple of | the glow- | 'ring sun
The extra unstressed syllable in the first foot makes the first three syllables collectively into an an anapest (da da DUM). This syllable suggests something is not quite right, supporting the opening descriptions of an almost alien world.
Note that "wild" could also be read as a single syllable, so that the line would read:
In the | wild pur- | ple of | the glow- | ring sun
Either way, these first few syllables create an awkward, heavy feeling. The word "of," too, receives a stress because of the iambic pentameter pattern, but feels deliberately awkward, anticipating the image of the pack-laden men later in the poem
The last line also makes a key variation, swapping an iamb for a trochee (DUM da) in its first foot:
Flounders | in mud. | O Je- | sus, make | it stop!
This early stress gives the verb "flounders" an extra sense of urgency and drama, conveying the way that the personified "hope" is struggling (metaphorically) in the mud.
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Rhyme Scheme
Even as early as the first two lines, the reader can tell that this is a rhymed poem. Indeed, on first look the poem appears to be a sonnet, with the rhyme falling into a sonnet-style pattern. But all is not as it seems—the poem has 13 lines, not the usual 14 of a sonnet. This is an overall strategy to suggest that something is wrong in the poem's world: things are not as they seem.
The rhyme scheme, then, is as follows:
AABACBDCDEFFE
Put simply, this isn't really a scheme at all—the poem seems to make it up as it goes along. In other words, the poem plays with the tension between reality and appearances. This was an important idea for Sassoon more generally, who felt that some war poets were guilty of mythologizing and poeticizing war in a way that failed to convey the realities of what it was actually like. The presence of rhyme coupled with the denial of a regular scheme suggests that war may seem structured (in terms of strategy, goals of gaining territory, etc.) but that for soldiers on the ground it's utterly chaotic.
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“Attack” Speaker
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The speaker in "Attack" is unspecified, but is clearly a witness to the battle that the poem describes. Usually, this poem (and others from the same collection) are interpreted as being based on Sassoon's own experience at war. Sassoon survived the war, after having served in it extensively.
But Sassoon deliberately avoids direct mention of himself. This makes the poem seem more universal and, in a grotesque kind of way, more commonplace. In other words, these could be the observations of one soldier among many, on any given day during the First World War. For the most part, the speaker maintains a detached tone. But the final line makes the desperation of the conflict stark and clear, bringing in the speaker's simple and personal plea to Jesus: "make it stop!"
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“Attack” Setting
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The poem's setting is the First World War. It doesn't, however, make reference to any specific battle during the war, meaning that this is more an account of the kind of battle that was commonplace. Indeed, these kinds of scenes would have been the reality for hundreds of thousands of men. Trench warfare took place on the European continent, with a great number of casualties exchanged for often small gains in territory.
The poem develops its sense of setting in an interesting way. Most of the first four lines are taken up with description of the environment in which the battle takes place, sounding almost—but not quite—picturesque. The vantage point then zooms in through the "purple" sunlight and "drifting smoke" to focus on the tanks. Then, in the poem's main section, the focus turns to the men themselves as they go "over the top" to meet death, injury, or a lucky escape.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Attack”
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Literary Context
Siegfried Sassoon is one of the most celebrated poets of the First World War. Born in 1886 to a fairly wealthy family, Sassoon later studied at Cambridge University, before leaving without his degree. In the years between leaving university and the start of the war, Sassoon lived a comfortable existence of writing and sport (especially cricket), supported by private family income. His first success in publishing was the 1913 parody The Daffodil Murder.
Sassoon served extensively during WWI. During a period of convalescence he met fellow poet Robert Graves. Both agreed that poetry ought to convey the "gritty realism" of war, as opposed to the overly romanticized and mythologized work of someone like Rupert Brooke (or, indeed, some of Sassoon's early work). This meeting had a strong effect on Sassoon, and shows up in the bleakness of this poem. In his other work of the time, the desire to show the realities of war meant that Sassoon made space in his poems for cowardice, suicide, the decomposition of corpses, and horrific injuries (among other challenging subjects).
In another period of recovery, Sassoon was to have a similar influence over the younger Wilfred Owen that Graves had had over him. Again, both men advocated an unflinching and realistic way of writing about the horrors of war. This perspective contrasts with the kind of nationalistic propaganda that the government used to make young men sign up to fight and to keep the public in favor of the war. Such was Sassoon's impact on Owen that a couple of key phrases from Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" were actually Sassoon's ideas.
It's also important to note that Sassoon was not just a war poet. Despite being one of the most daring and cavalier soldiers in the army—earning him the nickname Mad Jack—Sassoon somehow survived the war. He published poetry and novels after the war, and worked as an editor. He died in 1967.
Historical Context
At the time, World War I was described with the term "the war to end all wars"—a phrase that of course turned out to be tragically inaccurate with the onset of World War II. Around 16 million people died directly in WWI, with many more perishing in the great flu outbreaks and genocides (for example, the Armenian Genocide) that followed.
The war began with the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, who was the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which ruled a large section of Central and Eastern Europe at the time). The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, wished to see an end to Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Previously arranged allegiances soon brought Germany and Russia into opposition, and before too long this conflict pulled the other countries of Europe into the war as well. In 1915, the Germans sank a British passenger ship called the Lusitania, killing many civilians. Among other reasons, this event drew the United States into the conflict as well.
As described in the poem, WWI was a horrendously destructive war. Life in the trenches of Europe was terrifying and deadly, and the poor conditions caused frequent sickness and disease. Sassoon, however, is reputed to have been an incredibly brave soldier. His near-suicidal willingness to enter the line of fire earned him the nickname "Mad Jack," and his aptitude for war meant he was later awarded the Military Cross (one of the military's highest honors). Such facts should not cloud the fact that Sassoon came to be highly critical of the war, and of such conflict more generally. In his own words, he believed that: "Let no one ever, from henceforth say one word in any way countenancing war [...] for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages."
It's also important to note that Sassoon had a number of sexual relationships with other men long before it was made legal in the United Kingdom. He did, however, marry his wife Hester Gatty in 1933, with whom he had a child.
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More “Attack” Resources
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External Resources
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Sassoon's Correspondence — A letter from Sassoon to his uncle, shortly after Sassoon was wounded in battle.
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Sassoon's Life and Work — A BBC Radio documentary about Siegfried Sassoon and his poetry.
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More Poems From WWI — A valuable resource from the Poetry Foundation focusing on First World War poetry.
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A Reading of the Poem — Sassoon's poem read brilliantly by actor Gemma Arteton.
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Another Reading, This Time by Helen Mirren! — This excellent reading is by actor Dame Helen Mirren.
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Bringing WWI to Life — In this clip, director Peter Jackson discusses his recent WWI film, They Shall Not Grow Old. Though technology, Jackson brings old war footage to vivid life, restoring a sense of the soldiers as actual people.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Siegfried Sassoon
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