Language and style

As Siegfried Sassoon is considered a very important war poet, we advise you to pay attention to his style by focusing on the following analytical elements of “Does It Matter?”.

Playing with the language

The poem plays with language through the rhetorical sarcasm with which the speaker speaks for the soldier and through the bitterness that emerges from the words used. For example, the series of questions “does it matter” (l. 1, l. 6) and “do they matter” (l. 11) are ironic and reflect the poet’s frustration regarding the civil society that does not bother to understand veterans. Then, the poem also plays with language through the irony related to the way in which the soldier is supposed to behave in front of others: “And you need not show that you mind” (l. 3) or “There's such splendid work for the blind;” (l. 7...