The Soldier by Rupert Brooke

THE SOLDIER BY RUPERT BROOKE 

About Rupert Brooke :

When news broke of Rupert Brooke’s death in April 1915 “The Times” published an unrestrained eulogy. It referred to Brooke as “Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed…all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be…” Even though the subsequent depiction of Brooke as an almost God like figure threatened to confuse the man and the myth he was clearly an exceptionally accomplished, talented and popular figure both in school at Rugby where his father was a housemaster and at King’s College, Cambridge where he became a Fellow.

In the years before the war he travelled extensively in France, Germany and America. It was in Berlin that he composed one of his most famous poems “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” about his home in Cambridge. His impressions of the United States and Canada were published in a series of articles in the “Westminster Gazette” and Brooke continued to travel and write throughout 1913 and in to 1914 spending many happy months in Tahiti which he saw as a kind of Pacific paradise.

Like many of his generation Brooke saw the outbreak of war as an opportunity to revitalise a world “grown old and cold and weary.” (Sonnet: Peace 1914). He died of blood poisoning on a troopship destined for Gallipoli and was buried on the Greek island of Skyros.

About Poem :

If I should die, think only this of me:

      That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever 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 suns of home.

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.

 Brooke’s famous sonnet was written in 1914 and is one of the most celebrated examples of poems written at the outbreak of war that approached the conflict with a sense of noble self-sacrifice and patriotism.

The romantic idealism of “The Soldier” is clearly a world away from the brutality and suffering depicted in poems written after 1916 but note how the poem immediately accepts that the outcome of this cause to which the poet has freely committed himself may well be death. If he does not survive the war Brooke desires to be remembered not for his work as a writer or his qualities as a man but for his Englishness. The words “England” or “English” are used six times in the fourteen lines as Brooke celebrates life “…under an English heaven.” Rather than disappearing forever through death in a “foreign field” Brooke imagines that the richness of what England has given him will never be lost. Ultimately he will become, “A pulse in the eternal mind…”

He compares England to a mother giving birth to, nurturing and educating a son. Consider the depiction of England Brooke offers the reader. What does he appear to value and cherish? Is there a sense here of Brooke being not so much a war poet but a poet of peace?