ABSTRACT
Long before deafness came to me-during adolescence, in fact-one of my favourite poems was Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Everyone Sang’. It’s opening lines almost startled me when I first read them: ‘Everyone suddenly burst out singing; And I was fill’d with such delight’. They seemed to say all there was to be said about the unique and unexpected joy that the sounds of music can bring; specifically about the joy of unaccompanied voices singing spontaneously together. It was only much later that I became aware of Sassoon’s deep and festering anger and bitterness about the war in which he fought and which possessed him until the day he died, nearly 50 years after it had ostensibly finished.
