Book: The Old Huntsman

Overview
Published in 1917 while the First World War was still raging, The Old Huntsman and Other Poems is Siegfried Sassoon’s first widely noticed collection and a landmark of early British war poetry. The book gathers pieces written both before and during his frontline service, and that doubleness shapes its character: it opens into a rural, pastoral imagination and then turns, with mounting urgency, to the trenches. The title signals this hinge. The old huntsman himself is a figure of the English countryside, earthy, anecdotal, steeped in seasons and lore, whose presence frames the collection’s larger argument about memory, community, and the cost of modern war.

Shape and movement
The volume does not follow a strict narrative, but it has a discernible drift from idyll to indictment. Early pages favor reflective and descriptive lyrics suffused with birdsong, fields, and weather, where time seems cyclical and human lives partake in a settled rhythm. Gradually, sharper lights and harder edges intrude. Scenes of drill grounds, billets, and blasted landscapes supplant hedgerows; the book’s middle stretches focus on the common soldier’s labor, fear, and camaraderie; and later poems widen their view to include hospitals, funerals, and the uneasy distance between the front and those at home. The closing mood is mixed, tender toward the dead, wary of consolation, unwilling to release either pity or anger.

The title figure
The title poem presents a garrulous countryman whose memories spill into affectionate portraits of horses, hounds, and old companions, while time’s relentlessness shadows every recollection. His voice is intimate and humane, a repository of customs and sayings threatened by mechanized modernity. In the context of the collection, he becomes more than a character: he embodies a vanishing England whose values, courage, fellowship, craft, Sassoon refuses to surrender even as he exposes how official rhetoric betrays them. The huntsman’s long memory also models the book’s method, using storytelling to preserve what shellfire erases.

Themes
Disillusionment with patriotic cant runs through the wartime poems, yet the satire is anchored in compassion rather than cynicism. Sassoon’s soldiers are not abstractions; they are lads with mud-caked boots and private jokes, men who dread the next barrage and nonetheless step forward because someone must. Death is frequent, sometimes absurdly sudden, and the poems resist heroic inflation, honoring endurance over spectacle. Nature remains a counterpoint and a judge: skylarks, poppies, rain, and dawn light set the scale against which human violence looks both petty and appalling. The home front appears in uneasy cameo, parsons, publicists, and well-meaning civilians, whose phrases sound glib beside the trench’s realities. Later elegies search for words that can both remember and accuse, refusing the easy comfort of abstract glory.

Style and technique
Sassoon writes in clear, traditional forms, rhymed quatrains, couplets, ballad measures, tempered with abrupt colloquial turns and stagecraft learned from the mess and the dugout. Irony works as his chief instrument: gentle in pastoral pieces, mordant in the war poems where a last line will tilt a scene into revelation. Vivid sensory detail, stinks, claggy mud, lifting rains, the feel of a stretcher’s handles, keeps the poems grounded, while occasional Biblical or medieval echoes measure the moral fall from older codes of honor to industrial slaughter.

Place in Sassoon’s development
The Old Huntsman fixes the moment when a gifted Georgian lyricist became a soldier-poet of protest. It preserves elements of prewar ease while announcing the fierce clarity that would define his later work and shape friends and contemporaries, not least Wilfred Owen. As a book, it offers a mosaic rather than a manifesto: a countryman’s monologue, trench sketches, bitter little comedies, and grave farewells. Taken together, they make a single claim, that pity, exact speech, and faithful memory are the only honest answers to a modern war that threatens to erase them.