The Soldier by Rupert Brooke
About the Poet:
Rupert Brooke, (born Aug. 3, 1887, Rugby, Warwickshire, Eng.—died April 23, 1915, Skyros, Greece), English poet, a wellborn, gifted, handsome youth whose early death in World War I contributed to his idealized image in the interwar period. His best-known work is the sonnet sequence 1914.
At school at Rugby, where his father was a master, Brooke distinguished himself as a cricket and football (soccer) player as well as a scholar. At King’s College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1906, he was prominent in the Fabian (Socialist) Society and attracted innumerable friends. He studied in Germany and traveled in Italy, but his favourite pastime was rambling in the countryside around the village of Grantchester, which he celebrated in a charming and wildly irrational panegyric, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” (1912). In 1911 his Poems were published. He spent a year (1913–14) wandering in the United States, Canada, and the South Seas. With the outbreak of World War I, he received a commission in the Royal Navy. After taking part in a disastrous expedition to Antwerp that ended in a harrowing retreat, he sailed for the Dardanelles, which he never reached. He died of septicemia on a hospital ship off Skyros and was buried in an olive grove on that island.
Brooke’s wartime sonnets, 1914 (1915), brought him immediate fame. They express an idealism in the face of death that is in strong contrast to the later poetry of trench warfare.
About the Poem
"The Soldier" is a poem by Rupert Brooke written during the first year of the First World War (1914). It is a deeply patriotic and idealistic poem that expresses a soldier's love for his homeland—in this case England, which is portrayed as a kind of nurturing paradise. Indeed, such is the soldier's bond with England that he feels his country to be both the origin of his existence and the place to which his consciousness will return when he dies. The poem was a hit with the public at the time, capturing the early enthusiasm for the war (before the grim realities of longterm conflict made themselves known). Nowadays, the poem is seen as somewhat naïve, offering little of the actual experience of war. That said, it undoubtedly captures and distills a particular type of patriotism.
Text
Summary
If I die in the war, I want to be remembered in a particular way. Think of how the far-off land on which I die will have a small piece of England forever. That earth will be enriched by my dead body, because my body is made from dirt born in England. England created me and gave me consciousness, gave me her blooming plants to fall in love with, and gave me my sense of freedom. My body belongs to England, has always breathed English air. England's rivers cleansed me, and I was blessed by England's sun.
Also consider the way in which my soul, through death, will be made pure. My consciousness will return to the immortal consciousness like a beating pulse, and return the beautiful thoughts that England gave me. I'll return the sights and sounds of my home country; to the beautiful dreams that were as happy as England's daytime; and to the laughter shared with English friends. And I'll return England's gentleness, which lives in the English minds that are at peace under the English sky (the English heaven where I will be at peace too when I die).
“The Soldier” explores the bond between a patriotic British soldier and his homeland. Through this soldier’s passionate discussion of his relationship to England, the poem implies that people are formed by their home environment and culture, and that their country is something worth defending with their life. Indeed, the soldier sees himself as owing his own identity and happiness to England—and accordingly is willing to sacrifice his life for the greater good of his nation. This is, then, a deeply patriotic poem, implicitly arguing that nations have their own specific character and values—and that England’s are especially worthy of praise.
Though most people might fear death—particularly of the violent kind that war can bring—the speaker of “The Soldier” is prepared to die because he believes hew would be doing it for his beloved homeland. The speaker thus doesn’t want people to grieve his death. He sees that potential death—in some “foreign field” (notably “foreign” because it won’t be in England)—as a way of making a small piece of the world “for ever England.” That’s because he sees himself as an embodiment of his nation. Accordingly, dying somewhere “foreign” leaves a small part of the home nation in that foreign land. Nationhood, then, is portrayed as something that is inseparable from a person’s identity—even when they die.
Indeed, the speaker feels he owes his identity itself primarily to his country. It was the personified England that “bore” and “shaped” him, nourished him with sun (ironic, given the often gloomy weather!) and air, and cleansed him with “water.” Much of the sonnet’s octave—the eight-line stanza—is devoted to creating a sense of England as a pastoral, idyllic, and even Eden-like place. The poem’s imagery of rivers, flowers, earth, air, and sun, is part of an attempt to transform nationhood from a human concept to something more fundamental and natural (all the while tied to England specifically), as though the land is infused with the character of its people and vice versa.
In fact, this nationhood is so deeply embedded in who people are—or so the poem argues—that it extends beyond the earthly realm. Even the heaven that the speaker hopes to go to is specifically an “English heaven.” In part, that’s because the speaker’s idea of heaven is a projection of how he sees England—apart from being a kind of natural and nurturing mother, England is already a kind of heaven. Indeed, the poem presents England and heaven as almost interchangeable—as described above, everything about England is supposedly pure and nourishing. The speaker’s consciousness, after he dies, will return to an “eternal mind” which will still be forever linked to the place that created it.
There is nothing in the poem, then, of the horrors of war. Indeed, there is very little of the realities of war at all. This perhaps explains why the poem has inspired strong reactions ever since its publication. It was immensely popular when it was published in 1914, but this was before the true horrors of the First World War had been fully revealed, a time when the war was still tinged with an air of excitement, anticipation, and, of course, patriotism. In the decades that followed, some critics saw Brooke’s poetry as woefully naïve and sentimental. Either way, the poem is a powerful expression of patriotic desire and belief in the bond between people and their homeland.
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