Life’s Illuminings

A decoration in one of Sassoon’s manuscript poetry notebooks. From MS Add. 9852.

I am but the brain that dreamed and died.

The Humbled Heart

The second war which Sassoon had long feared broke out in 1939. He drew consolations from the reassuringly long sweep of English history, in which he saw the events of his own times situated, but his poetry was nevertheless permeated with both personal and national sorrow. Over the previous ten years Sassoon had emerged from a harrowing love affair with the artist Stephen Tennant to marry Hester Gatty, but in the following decade the marriage failed, and he led an increasingly confined life at Heytesbury House in Wiltshire.

In 1957 Sassoon became a Roman Catholic. He maintained that he had always been a religious poet, but his verse now took on a more overtly devotional tone, reflecting the spiritual exercises through which he practised and developed his faith. The carefully-chosen recollections of his literary works, in which he wove beauty and horror from memories and dreams, were in the end succeeded by an all-encompassing idealized hope.

A draft of Sassoon’s poem ‘On Scratchbury Camp’, 1942. From MS Add. 9852.

A decoration in a diary kept by Sassoon during the Second World War. From MS Add. 9852.

A Sassoon poem of the Second World War, written in 1942. MS Add. 9724/1/7.