Special request: Siegfried Sassoon's 'In Me Past, Present, Future Meet'

A brief break from the AQA anthology to investigate another war poem that a reader of the blog has asked me to look at. It's not one that often appears in the anthologies, and you can see why; it's opaque on first reading, and intensely symbolic, working through a series of complex metaphors to put across its ideas.It also doesn't, at first, seem to be much about the war. You can see the full text here.

The poem is intensely introspective, contemplating the speaker's state of mind. The speaker may be the poet, of course--and people are often eager to attribute this poem as an autobiographical revelation by Sassoon--but it is worth being careful about assuming that a first person speaking voice represents the poet, when it may equally be a representation of a particular state of mind.

With this caveat, let's look at the poem. It consists of two six-line stanzas, rhymed ABBABA CDCDEE in an eight-syllable line. It has something of the feeling of a sonnet in its brevity and concision, but of course is two lines short, and is also in iambic tetrameter rather than iambic pentameter. Nonetheless the air of a sonnet remains, in the complex interlaced rhyme structure and the concluding couplet. The second stanza could easily be the sestet of a Shakespearean sonnet, and the first stanza only needs two more lines rhymed AB to give is a perfect ABBAABBA octet. It is also a poem which asks a question or raises a problem, which we perhaps expect to have resolved in the couplet at the end, as it is so often resolved in the Shakespearean sonnet.

Given Sassoon's facility with verse, the near-sonnet is clearly a deliberate choice of form, which sets up certain expectations in the reader, and unbalances them slightly. The shorter lines make it appear concise and no-nonsense, and tend to reinforce the assertive statements made. Compare, for instance, Sassoon's original lines:

In me, past, present, future meet
to hold long, chiding conference.
My lusts usurp the present tense
And strangle Reason in his seat.

with my own version in iambic pentameter below. I have kept the rhyme and the meaning, but see how the longer line makes a huge difference to the tone of the poem:

In me, past present, future now do meet
To hold a long and chiding conference.
My lusts, I find, usurp the present tense
And surely strangle reason in his seat.

So Sassoon's choice of tetrameter adds real speed and pace to the lines, creating an almost breathless effect of urgency and passion.

Statesmen at the Versailles conference

Personification is a key technique in the poem. Past, present and future seem like people, able to meet and take action. Likewise Lust, reason and love are as vital in action as the imagined 'cave-man' or 'seer'. The speaker sees himself as like a battleground, or perhaps like a war between different and opposed concerns (one wonders if the speaker is indeed War personified). The past, the present and the future meet in the speaker, like politicians negotiating a peace-plan--though it is a 'chiding' conference, with people telling each other off, so not very peaceful. The image does not suggest that the past, present and future will easily come to terms.

Of course, this central opening image is a truth. In any human being past, present and future meet, as we bring our memories of the past and our hopes for the future to deal with our lived experience in the present. However, in this situation, the elements of personality do not behave themselves. they do not submit to the 'chiding' conference designed to resolve the speaker's internal feelings of conflict, but 'usurp' the present and transgress the boundaries that the future sets. In  other words, the speaker's lived experience--his past--that he brings to the 'conference' overwhelm him. His desires are so powerful that they invade the present--not only the present time, but the 'present tense'--that is the moment that he is speaking,  so that 'I loved' becomes 'I love' or 'I kissed' becomes 'I kiss'. Of course the poem itself enacts this, being cast in the present tense throughout.


The poet clearly feels intellectually that his desires should be suppressed--they offend against reason--but they are so strong that they overwhelm and kill reason ('strangling' in particular suggests that they stop reason from speaking). Reason is here seen as like a monarch enthroned (and of course the phrase 'the seat of reason' is a commonplace) whose authority is usurped by the rebellious desires of the speaker. Interestingly in the ancient world the heart was seen as the seat of reason (Aristotle thought of it as the seat of intelligence), whereas in the modern world this is generally thought of as the brain. As though liberated by the violence done to reason, 'lusts' transform into 'loves' which leap through the imagined restrictions of the future 'to dance', liberated, 'dream-enfranchised'--that is made free in a dream.

In the second stanza, the conflict within the speaker's mind is made even more explicit, with a series of contrasts between the 'cave-man' and the 'seer', Apollo and Abraham, and the tiger and the rose. These revelations are apparently enough to make the reader 'tremble' with self-knowledge.

The series of oppositions created is interesting. The cave-man seems to be an image of unabashed masculinity--brutal, physical, aggressive--that is certainly how cave-men would be seen at the time of writing (see the copy of a 1909 image of a caveman). It is reminiscent of the kind of image portrayed of the Germans on posters such as 'Destroy this mad Brute'. However, here the cave-man is not violent, but tenderly 'clasps' the seer, the prophet. The violent side of the speaker's nature, in other words, embraces the more mystical side.

The contrast between Apollo and Abraham is more complex. Garlanded Apollo is singing, as befits his status of the God of music and poetry. However, his singing falls literally upon deaf ears, as Abraham, the Old Testament prophet who represents the Judaeo-Christian moral code, perhaps, will not hear him.

The image is reminiscent of Wilfred Owen's great poem 'The Parable of the Old Man and the Young' which re-tells the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son Isaac, placing young men at war in the place of Isaac and politicians in the role of Abraham. In the original Old Testament story, Abraham is
told to sacrifice his son by God, and obeys, taking Isaac up a hill and building a pyre on which to sacrifice him. As he is about to cut his child's throat, he is prevented by the Angel of God, who tells him that he has pleased God by his obedience, and he is told to sacrifice a Ram who is caught by its horns in a thicket nearby. The story is a way of explaining why the Jewish people distinguished themselves from those peoples living around them who practised child sacrifice, and is also widely used in Christian theology as an analogy to Christ's sacrifice on the cross. In Owen's version, Abraham will not listen to the angel of God who tells him to spare his child and  'sacrifice the Ram of Pride instead'. Instead, it concludes, 'the old man would not so, but slew his son / And half the seed of Europe, one by one'. This horrific image may well lie behind Sassoon's idea of Abraham. In other words, Apollo's message of joy falls on deaf ears and poetry wastes its time trying to change the mind of people who think in this way. However, of course, it is not as simple as being able to say that Sassoon dislikes Judaeo-Christian religious thinking and wants to be a carefree poet, for both characters are described as 'in me'--in other words Sassoon himself is not only the poet and the seer, he is also the caveman and the Old Testament, punitive prophet.

Sassoon with Stephen Tennant (left)

At this point, it is tempting to think that the conflict that is evident in the poem is about the conflicts in Sassoon's own life. He certainly was conflicted in his attitude towards the war, known as 'Mad Jack' for his self-destructive heroism, but writing a public anti-war statement which risked imprisonment and court-martial for treason. He was also conflicted in his sexuality. Sassoon lived at a time when homosexuality was illegal, but its nonetheless thought to have had several fairly well-documented affairs with men, and was certainly at different times tormented with the ways in which his sexuality was denied free expression through the prevailing mores of his time. Perhaps this is what the poem indicates through the strongly contrasting images that run throughout it. The idea of 'lusts' overcoming rationality, and dreaming of a future when his loves would be free to express themselves in liberty would certainly mesh well with this reading. The final metaphor, 'in me the tiger sniffs the rose' is one which gently and humorously indicates how his powerful masculinity is drawn to sensuousness and delicacy. The use of the word 'sniffs' suggests a hesitancy or experimentation, and also a subtlety in the 'tiger' nature he describes.

The poem is strikingly reminiscent of the poem 'Peace' found in Sassoon's diary on 2nd April 1916:

In my heart there's cruel war that must be waged
In darkness vile with moans and bleeding bodies maimed;
A gnawing hunger drives me, wild to be assuaged,
And bitter lust chuckles within me unashamed.

This imagery of conflict and desire, the personification and wildness seem to mirror 'In Me'. However, 'Peace' is significantly more negative. If you compare the two poems, 'In Me' seems by contrast to be calm and resolved. The final lines in particular invite the reader to realise that the experience Sassoon describes is a universal experience. No-one is without conflict, no-one is without these 'elements' of humanity. If the reader is made fearful by the self-knowledge of this, then this is part of the human condition.

Adrian Caesar's Taking it Like a Man is an interesting examination of this aspect of Sassoon's experience, and he goes through in detail some of the ways in which the conflict is shown in his other poems. He also uses evidence from Sassoon's diaries to explain how Sassoon regarded his own sexuality. He speaks of a 'spiritual sickness' and says that he is 'self-poisoned' and 'self-imprisoned'. What is interesting is that in 'In Me', this kind of negative language is not present. There is certainly negativity in the 'chiding conference' and violence in 'strangle' but in general the images are positive ones: 'leap', 'dance', 'clasps' 'chanting' all imply  energy and activity but not poison or imprisonment. The openness suggested by the embrace of 'clasps' and the exploratory 'sniff' of the tiger suggests that Sassoon at this point in his life was able to admit the conflicts that he felt, but also feel that they were not destructive--but simply part of the 'elements' that made up being a man.