The Soldier

Hello everyone, This blog is a part of my thinking activity. In this blog I will discuss about Rupert Brooke's poem 'The Soldier'.

Introduction

Written during the first year of World War I, Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” is the last in his group of six “war sonnets,” collectively titled “1914.” Along with its companion poems, “The Soldier” represents many of the patriotic and traditional ideals that characterized prewar England, with Brooke portraying death for one’s country as a noble end and England as the noblest country for which to die. These poems made Brooke famous when they were first published in the periodical New Numbers in January of 1915, and a few months later, Dean Inge of St. Paul’s church read from them as part of his Easter Sunday sermon. “The Soldier” inspired many imitators and was, in large part, responsible for the popularity of Brooke’s 1914 and Other Poems and Collected Poems, which, combined, sold more than 300,00 copies between 1915 and 1925

About Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke was predominantly a war poet. Fellow poet Yeats once described him as “the handsomest young man in England” clearly that was before my birth! Unfortunately, that was a trait that Brooke took to the grave with him as he died tragically young at the age of just 27. Perhaps it is somewhat ironic that whilst he passed away whilst serving his country his death wasn’t particularly heroic. He died from sepsis caused by an infected mosquito wound.

Analysis of Poem

The Soldier is a poem by famed war poet, Rupert Brooke, renowned for both his boyish good looks and for this poem. Whilst a lot of war poetry, such as About Rupert Brooke

IF I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.

The poem starts off with what might be considered a sense of foreboding. Although one might think that this hints at the nature of the poem that is misleading as the poem almost espouses the idea of dying during wartime, rather than condemning it. This almost flies in the face of General Patton who once said “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his”! The opening line also provides a as if the poet is confessing in a letter or journal.

As soon as the second and third lines we see the narrator put a positive spin on his potential demise. I say “his” assuming the gender of the narrator. Unfortunately at the start of the First World War the roles of women in the military were non-existent and so it is safe to assume a narrator is a man. He talks of his death in a foreign field, this is presumably a reference to a battlefield. But rather than lamenting the notion of his own demise, he claims that it will mean there is a piece of England in that foreign country. So the suggestion here is that in some ways his death would be a victory.

Referring to his corpse as being “richer dust” is an interesting choice of words here and perhaps a reference to the phrase used during a funeral service. The classic “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” line. This idea that his body is simply made of dust isn’t necessarily totally symbolic. After all, we are primarily a carbon-based life form!

The dust metaphor continues into the fifth line where the poet talks about how that dust was formed and shaped by England. The concept that he is trying to put across is that he is the very embodiment of England, of course, the wider suggestion is that any soldier who dies for their country fulfills that same criterion. That soldiers are “shaped” by England and so when they die overseas they act almost like a seed, spreading Englishness.

The final three lines of the Octave are full of patriotic notions. They really create an image of England that is fantastic. This is done with the evocation of the natural world. Talking of flowers, the air, and rivers, these all help to create the image of England being a beautiful place. Through doing that the narrator is able to infer that a soldier can help to take the very fragments that helped to create that beauty and transport it to a foreign country. This act, if it were real, would of course be very noble.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

As is often the case with a sonnet the second stanza approaches a new concept. In this case, it appears that the narrator is adding a further thought due to the first line. “and think this” makes it seem like he has had an epiphany.

The use of language in this stanza is really interesting. It talks of hearts and minds in an attempt to personify England. The reason for doing this is because people have a vested interest in people. If you can humanize a country you can increase its value in the eyes of people. What I mean by this is that a person probably wouldn’t justify dying for bits of rock and dirt, but for another person? Well, that could be something worth giving your life for.

Note the use of the word “eternal”. Whilst not referencing England directly its use is very deliberate, it puts the thought of eternity into your mind so you associate that with England. This poem has a sense that England will prevail, that our sovereignty is eternal.

The poem draws to its conclusion in the final tercet. Once again this is used to extol the virtues of English culture. This is made to feel very visceral by drawing on the senses. This isn’t just about how England looks, but how it sounds as well. These descriptions are almost a way to justify what was said in the first stanza.

If the first stanza is saying it’s okay to die in war because it is good for your country, the second stanza is justifying that by suggesting “look, this is what you’d be dying for, isn’t it great?”

The final line is very clever. It uses really positive language in order to infer that dying in the field of battle ends up with you being at peace. It results in you ending up in heaven. Not just any heaven though, an English heaven. Can we then infer from this that there is a suggestion that an English heaven would be superior to any other nation’s heaven? I mean most religions would suggest that all nations share one heaven! I don’t think that is what is being suggested here. Rather I think that the phrase is used to make a comparison. The suggestion being that England is the closest you can come to heaven in the mortal world.

Historical Context

In 1914, the year Brooke wrote “The Soldier,” Europe was in tumult. That year Serbian nationalists murdered the heir to the throne of the Hapsburg (Austro-Hungarian) Empire, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and his wife in Sarajevo, touching off World War I. The war pitted Russia, England, and France against Germany and the Hapsburg Empire. On September 14, the First Battle of the Aisne began trench warfare, which was to define the primary way that human life would be lost during the war.

A year before the war, in 1913, Brooke had been awarded a fellowship to King’s College, but he chose to travel—to America and Canada, among other countries—instead, writing columns and essays about his travels for newspapers in England. For Brooke, leaving the country was also a welcome respite from many of the personal problems he was having with both the men and women in his life. Travel, for those who could afford it, was a popular form of escape for the English from a more rapidly encroaching industrialization and a society that was slowly losing its religious faith and whose colonial powers were being challenged. Brooke returned from his travels in June of 1914 and immediately attempted to enlist in the military, another form of escape for young men uncertain of Britain’s future and unsure of their own. After unsuccessfully attempting to secure a position as a correspondent, Brooke won a commission in the Royal Naval Division, with help from his patron, Edward Marsh. One of Brooke’s first assignments was to help the navy hold the Channel ports. He wound up, however, helping civilians evacuate from Antwerp as German shells rained down upon them. His next assignment, coming after the Christmas holidays (which he spent back in England composing the war sonnets), was with the Hood battalion, whose mission was to take back Constantinople from the Turks and open up Black Sea ports for the Russians. This was part of the Gallipoli campaign, a campaign Brooke might very well have died in had he not died, of fever, along the way.

Though he was one of the first to gain widespread acclaim for his writing, Brooke was only one of many British war poets during World War I. However, unlike Brooke’s poems, which expressed a die-hard, patriotic attitude at the beginning of the war, the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg (the latter two of whom died in the war) questioned this attitude and the willingness with which so many soldiers marched to their deaths. Sassoon, himself already an established poet during the war, helped to publish Owen’s poetry after the war in 1920. The two had met during the war in the sanatorium. Sassoon made it out alive; unfortunately, Owen returned to the front and was killed shortly thereafter. Up until Owen, Sassoon, and Rosenberg, war poetry had often taken glory and heroism as its subjects. Owen, Sassoon, and Rosenberg introduced the modern subjects of bitterness, cynicism, and pity