Siegfried Sasson illustrates the dramatic transformation most soldiers went through after experiencing World War 1. Englishmen like Sasson initially thought themselves as involved in a heroic effort to defend liberalism and the British a hellish and pointless nightmare. Intellectuals like Paul Valery were also disillusioned by the war, and many feared that the West and its liberal values would not long survive. In the essay below, he makes allusion to the scene in which Hamlet ponders mortality while studying the skull that is all that remains of a man he had known in life.
The poem "The Cloud" by Percy Bysshe Shelley employs an extended metaphor, as it compares a cloud to life throughout the whole poem.
The cloud is meant to stand for the cycle of nature, or the unending cycle of life. Through the many cycles and transformations that the cloud endures, Shelley wants to represent the never ending cycle of birth, death and rebirth that all beings on Earth go through. The poem, therefore, focuses on the mutability of nature as the only constant in the physical world. Moreover, this allows the author to also employ the cloud as a symbol of the many changes that humans undergo throughout their lives.
Garrison cared about his image above all else
