"Only watched tennis" melancholy, longing, irony in Terence Davies's Benediction
"Only watched tennis" melancholy, longing, irony in Terence Davies's Benediction
Set during and after World War I, Terence Davies’s biographical film about the poet Siegfried Sassoon, Benediction (2021), evokes a vision of pre-war England through its repeated but often displaced evocations of tennis. From Sassoon’s opening voiceover—“In that long summer I hunted, played cricket but only watched tennis”—to the final, ironic musical number that invokes “typically English tennis at a typically English club,” tennis functions as a melancholic emblem of cultural decorum, sexual repression, and Sassoon’s overwhelming private and public loss. This paper argues that the deployment of tennis in Benediction marks the vanishing point of a national and aesthetic ideal, where the values of Edwardian England, those of elegance, restraint, and fairness, are rendered into spectres by brute violence and conflict.
Owen, Joseph
5a9d0ced-96e5-45af-8dab-89a778d6a375
16 April 2026
Owen, Joseph
5a9d0ced-96e5-45af-8dab-89a778d6a375
Owen, Joseph
(2026)
"Only watched tennis" melancholy, longing, irony in Terence Davies's Benediction.
Tennis in Literature and Film, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Brescia, Italy.
15 - 17 Apr 2026.
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Abstract
Set during and after World War I, Terence Davies’s biographical film about the poet Siegfried Sassoon, Benediction (2021), evokes a vision of pre-war England through its repeated but often displaced evocations of tennis. From Sassoon’s opening voiceover—“In that long summer I hunted, played cricket but only watched tennis”—to the final, ironic musical number that invokes “typically English tennis at a typically English club,” tennis functions as a melancholic emblem of cultural decorum, sexual repression, and Sassoon’s overwhelming private and public loss. This paper argues that the deployment of tennis in Benediction marks the vanishing point of a national and aesthetic ideal, where the values of Edwardian England, those of elegance, restraint, and fairness, are rendered into spectres by brute violence and conflict.
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Published date: 16 April 2026
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Tennis in Literature and Film, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Brescia, Italy, 2026-04-15 - 2026-04-17
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Local EPrints ID: 511816
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/511816
PURE UUID: 6aff3943-fa4d-4261-8c4f-32752776559c
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Date deposited: 03 Jun 2026 16:50
Last modified: 04 Jun 2026 02:07
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