Glory of Women quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which poetic form best describes "Glory of Women"?

   • Free Verse
   • Villanelle
   • Ballad
   • Correct answer: Petrarchan Sonnet
   • Shakespearean Sonnet

   Correct: The poem is a Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet with 14 lines divided into an octave and a sestet, using the volta at line 9 to shift from bitter sarcasm to graphic battlefield reality.

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2. 2

   Question 2. According to the octave, what does the women's love for soldiers depend on?

   • Letters from the front that tell them honestly how much the men are suffering in the trenches
   • Correct answer: A cleaned-up picture of war: heroes on leave, polite wounds, medals, and thrilling tales
   • The money and pensions that the soldiers send home to their families during the war
   • Their own memories of fighting alongside the men in earlier wars fought abroad

   The women love the men when they are "home on leave" or "wounded in a mentionable place." They "worship decorations" and are thrilled by tales of danger. Their love depends on a version of war with the truth left out. That is why the sestet's fleeing troops, corpses, and mud are things the speaker says they "can't believe."

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3. 3

   Question 3. What is the dominant tone of the octave (first eight lines)?

   • Correct answer: Bitterly ironic -- every apparent compliment is actually an accusation of willful ignorance
   • Genuinely grateful -- the speaker appreciates women's emotional support during wartime
   • Mournfully elegiac -- the speaker grieves for the lost innocence of both soldiers and women
   • Coldly detached -- the speaker observes women's behavior without personal emotion or judgment

   Lines like "You love us when we're heroes" and "You listen with delight" are barbed with sarcasm. Sassoon uses the appearance of gratitude to expose how women's admiration depends on a sanitized, heroic version of war that erases its true horror.

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4. 4

   Question 4. What double meaning does the line "You make us shells" carry?

   • Women literally manufactured protective armor for the troops, and figuratively hardened soldiers into shells incapable of feeling fear or pain
   • Women literally collected shell casings as souvenirs, and figuratively treasured them as precious as the military decorations they worship
   • Correct answer: Women literally manufactured artillery shells in factories, and figuratively reduced soldiers to empty shells of their former selves
   • Women literally knitted woolen socks for the soldiers, and figuratively surrounded them with a protective shell of affection from home

   During WWI, thousands of women worked in munitions factories making artillery shells. Sassoon exploits this fact to create a devastating pun: the same women who support the war effort literally produce the weapons that destroy soldiers, and metaphorically hollow them out into empty "shells" of human beings.

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5. 5

   Question 5. What does "laurelled" allude to in "mourn our laurelled memories"?

   • The botanical name for the bay leaves placed on soldiers' graves in France
   • Correct answer: The ancient Greek and Roman laurel wreath, a symbol of victory and honor
   • The laurel tree under which soldiers were traditionally buried in England
   • A popular brand of military medal ribbon used in the British Army

   The laurel wreath crowned victors in ancient Greek athletic and military competitions. By calling dead soldiers' memories "laurelled," Sassoon shows how women frame death as glorious triumph -- crowning the dead with honor rather than confronting the ugly reality of how they died.

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6. 6

   Question 6. What happens at the volta (turn) beginning at line 9?

   • The speaker stops addressing British women and turns exclusively to a German mother for the remainder of the poem
   • The speaker abandons his bitter irony and begins to share the women's belief that chivalry redeems the war's disgrace
   • The speaker moves from describing battlefield danger to remembering the women waiting patiently at home in England
   • Correct answer: The speaker shifts from cataloguing women's romantic illusions to revealing the brutal reality they refuse to see

   The volta is the Petrarchan sonnet's signature turn. Here, "You can't believe that British troops 'retire'" shifts from the polite drawing-room language of the octave to graphic images of soldiers running blind with blood over corpses. The formal structure mirrors the poem's argument: illusion (octave) versus reality (sestet).

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7. 7

   Question 7. Why does Sassoon place the word "retire" in quotation marks?

   • To suggest that the soldiers are pretending to retreat as a deliberate tactical maneuver to lure the enemy forward
   • To show that retirement from military service was being discussed as an option for shell-shocked soldiers
   • Correct answer: To mark it as a military euphemism for chaotic retreat, highlighting how official language sanitizes the reality of terrified soldiers fleeing
   • To indicate a direct quotation from a specific general's battlefield dispatch that Sassoon read in a newspaper

   "Retire" is a clean, orderly military term for what is actually a panicked rout. The quotation marks are Sassoon's typographic sneer -- they force the reader to see the gap between the euphemism and the reality of broken men running over dead bodies.

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8. 8

   Question 8. What does "Ardours" mean in this story?

   • Correct answer: Intense feelings of passion, enthusiasm, or fervent zeal for a cause
   • Feelings of cold indifference, apathy, or a lack of interest in a cause
   • Acts of extraordinary bravery and daring performed in the face of danger
   • Difficult, exhausting labors that demand tremendous effort and endurance

   "Ardours" means intense passion or zeal. The women "crown" (glorify) the soldiers' distant passion for battle, transforming fear and suffering into noble fervor. The irony is that the soldiers' real experience is nothing like the passionate heroism women imagine.

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9. 9

   Question 9. Why does Sassoon introduce a German mother in the final three lines?

   • To praise the German mother's quiet devotion by the fire, presenting her as a nobler model than British women
   • Correct answer: To universalize the anti-war message by showing that maternal ignorance of war's horror crosses national and enemy lines
   • To contrast German women's practical domesticity with British women's obsession with military decorations
   • To suggest that Germany bears greater moral responsibility for the war, since it is the German son who dies in the mud

   The sudden shift to a German mother is the poem's most devastating move. By showing an "enemy" mother dreaming by the fire, knitting socks for a son whose face is already in the mud, Sassoon strips away nationalism entirely. The gap between domestic comfort and battlefield horror is universal -- it belongs to all women, all mothers, on every side of the war.

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10. 10

    Question 10. What collection was "Glory of Women" published in?

    • Vigils (1934)
    • The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon (1919)
    • Correct answer: Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
    • The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1917)

    "Glory of Women" appeared in Counter-Attack and Other Poems, published in 1918. The collection was Sassoon's most overtly angry and anti-war volume, written after his famous "Soldier's Declaration" protesting the continuation of the war.

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11. 11

    Question 11. What makes the final image -- "His face is trodden deeper in the mud" -- so powerful?

    • Correct answer: It juxtaposes the mother's loving domestic act (knitting socks) with the son's faceless death, making her care tragically futile
    • It reveals that the son has been taken prisoner and is being mistreated by enemy soldiers in a mud-filled camp
    • It uses mud as a metaphor for the moral corruption of the German military command that sent young men to die
    • It echoes an earlier line about British soldiers wounded in a mentionable place, completing a structural parallel

    The mother knits socks for feet that will never wear them -- her son's face is already pressed into the mud by the boots of other soldiers. The enjambment between "send your son" and "His face is trodden" creates a grammatical ambush: the sentence about maternal love collapses into the image of death. It is one of the most devastating closings in war poetry.

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12. 12

    Question 12. What rhetorical device does Sassoon employ by addressing "you" throughout the poem?

    • Dramatic monologue -- the speaker reveals his character through an extended solo speech to a silent listener
    • Anaphora -- the repetition of "you" at the beginning of lines for rhythmic emphasis
    • Prosopopoeia -- giving human qualities to an abstract concept like patriotism or duty
    • Correct answer: Apostrophe -- directly addressing an absent audience to create a confrontational, accusatory tone

    Apostrophe is the direct address of an absent person, group, or abstraction. Sassoon uses it to confront women who cannot hear him, turning the poem into an accusation they can never answer. The relentless "you" makes the reader feel personally indicted.

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13. 13

    Question 13. Which of these events actually happened in the story?

    • The speaker accuses women of loving soldiers only when they conform to a heroic, sanitized image.

      Happened

      Lines 1-2 establish this: women love soldiers "when we're heroes, home on leave, / Or wounded in a mentionable place" -- love is conditional on the wound being polite enough to discuss.

    • The women in the poem are depicted as working in field hospitals near the front lines.

      Didn't happen

      The women are firmly on the home front -- worshipping decorations, listening to tales, making shells in factories. They are never shown near actual combat.

    • The speaker says women believe that chivalry can redeem the disgrace of war.

      Happened

      Line 4 states directly: "That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace" -- the women cling to medieval ideals of honor as justification for industrial slaughter.

    • The poem describes British soldiers retreating in an orderly, disciplined manner.

      Didn't happen

      The opposite: soldiers run in blind panic, "trampling the terrible corpses -- blind with blood." The euphemistic "retire" is placed in quotation marks to mock the idea of orderly withdrawal.

    • The poem ends by addressing a German mother whose son has been killed.

      Happened

      The final three lines shift to "O German mother dreaming by the fire" whose son's "face is trodden deeper in the mud" -- universalizing the theme across enemy lines.

    • The speaker eventually forgives the women for their ignorance about the war.

      Didn't happen

      There is no forgiveness or softening. The poem's final image -- a dead son's face in the mud -- is its most brutal, and the accusatory tone never relents.

    • Women are described as manufacturing artillery shells in the poem.

      Happened

      "You make us shells" refers to women's work in munitions factories during WWI, while also carrying the metaphorical meaning of hollowing soldiers out into empty shells.

    • The poem is written from the perspective of a soldier who has returned home permanently.

      Didn't happen

      The speaker uses "while we fight" (present tense) and "when we're killed" -- he is still in the war, addressing women from the front, not from the safety of home.

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