The Soldier
Rupert-brooke
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The Soldier by Rupert Brooke
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Rupert-brookeAbout
Rupert Brooke’s most famous poem of the WWI era.
This poem, a sonnet, (see below) is notably Edwardian in its formal setting. It is thematically patriotic and offers a sentimental image of the soldier dying at war. These elements serve to separate this work from that of other, more modern poets who...
The Soldier Annotated
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.
The Soldier Q&A
Why would he write patriotic poems if he had experienced war?
Because of the culture of the time. At the beginning of WW1 there was a wave of intense patriotism throughout Britain that led men and even boys as young as 16 to enlist. There had been little experience of war since the Boer War of the 1880s, and they were a small number of professional soldiers. S...