The Soldier

 Poem: The Soldier by Rupert Brooke

As Brooke reached the end of his sonnet series about the start of World War One, he turned to what happened when the soldier died, while abroad, in the middle of the conflict. When The Soldier was written the bodies of servicemen were not regularly brought back to their homeland but buried nearby where they had died. In World War One this produced vast graveyards of British soldiers in ‘foreign fields’, and allows Brooke to portray these graves as representing a piece of the world that will be forever England. He prefigured the vast numbers of soldiers whose bodies, torn to shreds or buried by shellfire, remain buried and unknown as a result of the methods of fighting that war.

For a nation desperate to turn the senseless loss of its soldiers into something that could be coped with, even celebrated, Brooke’s poem became a cornerstone of the remembrance process, and is still in heavy use today.

It has been accused, not without merit, of idealizing and romanticizing war, and stands in stark contrast to the poetry of Wilfred Owen. Religion is central to the second half, with the idea that the soldier will awake in a heaven a redeeming feature for their death in war. The poem also makes great use of patriotic language: it is not any dead soldier, but an ‘English’ one, written at a time when to be English was considered by the English as the greatest thing to be.

The soldier in the poem is considering his own death, but is neither horrified nor regretful. Rather, religion, patriotism and romanticism are central to distracting him. Some people regard Brooke’s poem as among the last great ideals before the true horror of modern mechanized warfare was made clear to the world, but Brooke had seen action and knew well of a history where soldiers had been dying on English adventures in foreign countries for centuries and still wrote it.

https://www.thoughtco.com/the-soldier-by-rupert-brooke-1221215