Wirers

“Wirers” is a short poem by English poet Siegfried Sassoon. It was written in 1917 and published in Sassoon’s collection, Counter-Attack and Other Poems in 1918. Sassoon was a British army officer who fought on the Western Front during World War I. He is most famous for his antiwar poems, and “Wirers” is typical of his work. The poem is about a group of British soldiers who venture at night into the area known as no-man’s-land in order to repair the barbed-wire entanglements protecting the British line from German attack. The antiwar theme is sharply conveyed in the ironic final line.

Poet Biography

Siegfried Sassoon was born into a wealthy family on September 8, 1886, in the village of Matfield, Kent, England. He was the second of three sons born to Alfred and Theresa Sassoon. His parents separated and his father died of tuberculosis when Sassoon was eight years old. As a young boy, Sassoon was educated by private tutors, after which he attended New Beacon School and Marlborough College, where he began to write poetry. From 1906-08 he was an undergraduate at Clare College, Cambridge, although he did little work and left after two years without a degree. He self-published his first collection of poems, Poems, in 1906, and then dedicated much of his time to writing poetry.