Sassoon is famous as a poet of the first world war, but On Scratchbury Camp was written during the second world war, in 1942. Scratchbury Camp is an iron-age hill fort in Wiltshire and Sassoon lived nearby for much of his life. This is an altogether calmer and more reflective piece than the angry and bitter western front poems.
The poem captures the atmosphere of the Wiltshire downs on a June day. The distant past and the present are linked, as are human activity and the natural world. By describing the way in which the ancient fort seems to have been absorbed into the landscape, Sassoon is suggesting that one day the current war will be forgotten. The dreamy mood tells us that the older Sassoon is content to be an observer of this new war rather than a participant.
I think there is a certain resemblance to John Masefield’s poems of the southern English countryside here.
The linking of modern aeroplanes to the distant past of the landscape also reminds me of the opening of Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale.
On Scratchbury Camp by Siegfried Sassoon
Along the grave green downs, this idle afternoon,
Shadows of loitering silver clouds, becalmed in blue,
Bring, like unfoldment of a flower, the best of June.
Shadows outspread in spacious movement, always you
Have dappled the downs and valleys at this time of year,
While larks, ascending shrill, praised freedom as they flew.
Now, through that song, a fighter-squadron’s drone I hear
From Scratchbury Camp, whose turfed and cowslip’d rampart seems
More hill than history, ageless and oblivion-blurred.
I walk the fosse, once manned by bronze and flint-head spear;
On war’s imperious wing the shafted sun-ray gleams:
One with the warm sweet air of summer stoops the bird.
Cloud shadows, drifting slow like heedless daylight dreams,
Dwell and dissolve; uncircumstanced they pause and pass.
I watch them go. My horse, contented, crops the grass.
The Good Reader 