riddhi28bhatt@gmail.com
Sem :2
Roll No. :15
PG year :2020-2022
PG Enrollment No. :3069206420200004
Paper Name :110 (History of English Literature 1900 to 2000)
Topic Name : War Poetry : War and Death in “The Soldier”
Submitted to :Smt. S.B.Gardi Department of English
War and Death in “The Soldier”
✅Introduction :
“The Soldier”, is a British patriotic sonnet written by Rupert Brooke in 1914. It expresses love for the mother country which in this case is Great Britain. This poem describes the physical aspects of death and the writer’s opinion of it. Although death is the main point in this poem, it not depicted in a twisted and gruesome manner.
"The Soldier" is a poem written by Rupert Brooke. The poem is the fifth in a series of poems entitled 1914. It was published in 1915 in the book 1914 and Other Poems. It is often contrasted with Wilfred Owen's 1917 antiwar poem "Dulce et Decorum est". The manuscript is located at King's College, Cambridge.
✅Who was Rupert Chawner Brooke? :
Few writers have provoked as much excessive praise and scornful condemnation as English poet Rupert Brooke. Handsome, charming, and talented, Brooke was a national hero even before his death in 1915 at the age of 27. His poetry, with its unabashed patriotism and graceful lyricism, was revered in a country that was yet to feel the devastating effects of two world wars. Brooke's early death only solidified his image as "a golden-haired, blue-eyed English Adonis," as Doris L. Eder notes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and among those who lauded him after his death were writers Virginia Woolf and Henry James and British statesman Winston Churchill. In the decades after World War I, however, critics reacted against the Brooke legend by calling his verse foolishly naive and sentimental. Despite such extreme opinions, most contemporary observers agree that Brooke—though only a minor poet—occupies a secure place in English literature as a representative of the mood and character of England before World War I.
Rupert Chawner Brooke was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially The Soldier. He was also known for his boyish good looks, which were said to have prompted the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man in England".’On Easter Sunday in 1915, the dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, William Ralph Inge, read aloud "The Soldier." Brooke's death three weeks later insured that his name would always be intertwined with the war sonnets, and with "The Soldier" in particular. As A.C. Ward comments, "The Soldier" "became the one poem inseparably linked with Rupert Brooke's name.
✅What was Rupert Brooke's poetry style? :
Rupert Brooke wrote his poems in neo-Romantic style, inspired by the style of Georgian poets. His famous poems are “The Peace”, “The Dead”, “The Soldier”, “And Love has Changed to Kindliness”, “Blue Evening”, “Retrospect”, “A Channel Passage”, and “Beauty and Beauty”.
A more realistic poetry grew out of the war's latter stages and supplanted Brooke's verse as the most important literary expression of the war. Poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves captured the terror and tragedy of modern warfare; next to their poetry, Brooke's war sonnets seem "sentimental and unrealistic," notes Lehmann. For several decades after his death Brooke's poetry—though always popular—was dismissed by critics responding both to the consequences of two world wars and to the pessimistic poetry that dominated the age, of which T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is the prime example. But more recent critics, while admitting that Brooke's poetry lacks depth, maintain that his verse does have significance. In Rupert Brooke: The Man and the Poet, Robert Brainard Pearsall does not deny the "slightness in mass and idea" of Brooke's work but avers that "all technical criticism droops before the fact that his verse was lyrical, charming, and companionable."
✅Original Poem :
The Soldier - RUPERT BROOKE
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.
✅War and Death in "The Soldier" :
The very first thing the speaker of "The Soldier" talks about is his own death. Throughout the first stanza, he talks about himself as "dust," a word that makes us immediately think of funerals, death, and corpses. Good times! Death almost seems inevitable, and this despite the fact that speaker says "If" in the very first line! We're used to thinking of death as scary, but the speaker imagines a life after death that seems, at the very least, peaceful and familiar.
By frequently referring to the soldier as dust, the speaker suggests that the soldiers who went off to war were already, in some sense, dead. Bummer. Not so fast there, soldier. Imagining heaven as exactly the same as your favorite place on Earth is really not preparing yourself to die.
The poem is called "The Soldier," so naturally it's about… war. Unlike many other famous World War I-era poems, however, Brooke paints a more optimistic picture. The soldier's possible death is mentioned, yes, but so is a blissful life after death. Moreover, the poem celebrates the fact that the soldier's death will give England another "corner" of land. So, for the speaker, all this warfare business seems like a big win! Of course, he hasn't actually been to war just yet.
.The Soldier is a sonnet in which Brooke glorifies England during the First World War. He speaks in the guise of an English soldier as he is leaving home to go to war. The poem represents the patriotic ideals that characterized pre-war England.
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.
In his most famous sonnet, “The Soldier,” which appeared in December 1914, Rupert Brooke’s poetic voice declares: “if I should die think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.” By April 1915, Brooke was dead. That Winston Churchill promptly declared that these lines expressed the “sorrow of youth about to die” immediately ensured that Brooke would become a patriotic icon of a poetic genius who had anticipated his own doom on the way to Gallipoli. Although recent criticism has sought to reveal the ways in which Brooke's sonnet belonged to a carefully crafted “celebrity aesthetic,” the present discussion situates “The Soldier” in Brooke’s longstanding poetics of death, which began during his schooldays when he immersed himself in decadent poetry. This article shows that in many of his poems Brooke struggles with his deepening fears--one mediated through several sources, such as Nietzsche, which he encountered before World War I--about the inescapable nature of decay. His poems about death venture into imaginative realms that seek to animate the afterlife, sometimes in comic forms, though with the enduring recognition that nothing can ultimately remain alive--in a phrase he gleaned from Donne--in the yearned-for “aeterna corpora” of art.
✅What is the message of the Soldier by Rupert Brooke? :
"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.
✅What Is The Theme Of The Poem The Soldier? :
In 1599, William Shakespeare wrote a play called “Henry V”. Within the play, many speeches would be explored. Also, I would be using a selection of war poems to compare and explore the ways that war is presented in a positive and negative way. “The Soldier” was written by Rupert Brooke in 1914 in a traditional sonnet form. The key themes of this poem are love and death which is the two most powerful things that recall the feeling of readers. Death, as he is a soldier going into World War One, and love in the sense of loving his country. Brooke’s poem “The Soldier.
There is nothing difficult about the word choice or its sentence structures. “I knew a simple soldier boy” could almost be the opening sentence for a children book: it is cheerful, pleasant, and appealing. The use of the word “boy”, rather than using “soldier”, helps to make the youth sound particularly young and vulnerable. However, in line 2 where the writer uses oxymoron of “empty joy”. His joy is “empty” in the sense of that it arises from no particular provocation. He also sleeps soundly “through the lonesome dark”. This could mean that he is undisturbed by worries, nightmares, or fears of any kind. The last line in the first stanza, “And whistled early with the lark” creates an image of the boy who wakes up bright and early, and was happy to be awake and living. However, in the trenches, men were not happy to be awake and to them, living might be mean a pain. Also, “lark” is a spring bird, it seems to represent youthfulness. Soon after this stanza, the image of a happy boy is destroyed by the dark, and we begin to feel the depression of the boy. This present the war as a thief and steal youth from every young boy that joined that.
✅Critical Analysis of this poem :
The speaker implies that England is mother to him. His love for England and his willingness to sacrifice is equivalent to a son’s love for his mother; but more than an ordinary son, he can give his life to her. The imagery in the poem is typically Georgina. The Georgian poets were known for their frequent mediations in the English countryside. England’s “flowers”, “her ways to roam”, and “English air” all represent the attitude and pride of the youth of the pre-industrial England; many readers would excuse the jingoistic them of this poem if they remember that this soldier’s bravery and sense of sacrifice is far better than the modern soldier and warfare in which there is nothing grand about killing people with automated machine guns! The soldier also has a sense of beauty of his country that is in fact a part of his identity. In the final line of the first stanza, nature takes on a religious significance for the speaker. He is “washed by the rivers”, suggesting the purification of baptism, and “blest by the sun of home.” In the second stanza, the sestet, the physical is left behind in favor of the spiritual. If the first stanza is about the soldier’s thought of this world and England, the second is about his thoughts of heaven and England (in fact, and English heaven).
In the sestet, the soldier goes on to tell the listener what to think of him if he dies at war, but he presents a more imaginative picture of himself. He forgets the grave in the foreign country where he might die, and he begins to talk about how he will have transformed into an eternal spirit. This means that to die for England is the surest way to get a salvation: as implied in the last line, he even thinks that he will become a part of an English heaven. The heart will be transformed by death. All earthly “evil” will be shed away. Once the speaker has died, his soul will give back to England everything England has given to him- in other words, everything that the speaker has become. In the octave, the speaker describes his future grave in some far off land as a part of England; and in the sestet England takes on the role of a heavenly creator, a part of the “eternal mind” of God. In this way, dying for England gains the status of religious salvation, wherever he dies. Wherever he dies, his death for England will be a salvation of his soul. It is therefore the most desirable of all fates.
The images and praises of England run through both the stanzas. In the first stanza Brooke describes the soldier’s grave in a foreign land as a part of England; in the second, that actual English images abound. The sights, sounds, dreams, laughter, friends, and gentleness that England offered him during his life till this time are more than enough for him to thank England and satisfactorily go and die for her. The poet elaborates on what England has granted in the second stanza; ‘sights and sounds’ and all of his “dreams.” A “happy” England filled his life with “laughter” and “friends”, and England characterized by “peace” and “gentleness”. It is what makes English dust “richer” and what in the end guarantees “hearts at peace, under an English Heaven.”
This is a sonnet based on the two major types of the sonnet: Petrarchan or Italian and Shakespearean or English. Structurally, the poem follows the Petrarchan mode; but in its rhyme scheme, it is in the Shakespearean mode. In terms of the structure of ideas, the octave presents reflection; the sestet evaluates the reflection. The first eight lines (octave) is a reflection on the physical: the idea of the soldier’s “dust” buries in a “foreign field.” They urge the readers not to mourn this death, though they implicitly also create a sense of loss. The last six lines (sestet), however, promise redemption: “a pulse in the eternal mind…. under an English heaven”.
✅Conclusion :
The Soldier is a sonnet in which Brooke glorifies England during the First World War. He speaks in the guise of an English soldier as he is leaving home to go to war. The poem represents the patriotic ideals that characterized pre-war England. It portrays death for one’s country as a noble end and England as the noblest country for which to die.The rhyme scheme is that of the Shakespearean sonnet: the octave and the sestet consist of three quatrains, rhyming abab cdcd efef and a final rhymed couplet gg. As in Shakespearean sonnets, the dominant meter is iambic.
✅References :
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Rupert Brooke". Encyclopedia Britannica, 19 Apr. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rupert-Brooke. Accessed 8 June 2021.
- Bristow, Joseph. (2014). Rupert Brooke's Poetic Deaths. ELH. 81. 663-692. 10.1353/elh.2014.0021.
- POETRY FOUNDATION. www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13076/the-soldier.
- STALLWORTHY, JON. “Who Was Rupert Brooke?” Critical Survey, vol. 2, no. 2, 1990, pp. 185–193. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41555527. Accessed 8 June 2021.
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