For one whom Yeats proclaimed “the handsomest young man in England” Rupert Brooke [E1] [E2] has not aged well. The neo-Romanticism of Brooke and the Georgian Poets was one of the casualties of The Great War. Paul Fussell (in “The Great War and Modern Memory”) sees irony as one of the by-products of the First World War, and one of the many ironies of the war is that Rupert Brooke is remembered as a war poet at all, because he is actually not a war poet - not in the same sense that Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen are war poets. Rupert Brooke is rather a pre-war poet. To borrow Blake’s contrast, Brooke wrote Songs of Innocence (if not naïveté), while Sassoon and Owen (and others) wrote Songs of Experience.
After his enlistment in the Navy and brief service in Belgium, Brooke wrote his war sonnets in which he advanced the idea that war is clean and cleansing, rather like a good swim. He tried to testify the safeness of war, in which the only thing that can suffer is the body , and even death is seen as the safest shelter of all against the dangers of life.Traditional not only in form, his poems were the last to express idealistic patriotism also because, unlike the other War Poets, who lived to witness the horrors of trench warfare, Brooke died in 1915 at the age of 28, of blood poisoning on the Greek island of Skyros. His early death and the publication of his “Collected Poems” in 1918, made him immensely popular, turning him into a new symbol of the “young romantic hero”.
Brooke was already a promising young poet when Britain entered the war the day after his 27th birthday. Unfortunately, the publication of his (pre-) “war sonnets” coincided with his almost mythological (pre-war) death: on Easter Sunday, 1915, Dean Inge read his sonnet “The Soldier” from the pulpit of Saint Paul’s; on April 23rd (St. George’s Day, the traditional observance of Shakespeare’s birth) Brooke died in the Aegean Sea (from blood poisoning) on his way to battle at Gallipoli and was buried on the Island of Skyros. Winston Churchill wrote his obituary for The Times, Lascelles Abercrombie for the Morning Post. As D.H. Lawrence exclaimed: “he was slain by bright Pheobus’ shaft . . . it was a real climax of his pose . . . bright Pheobus smote him down. It is all in the saga. O God, O God; it is all too much of a piece: it is like madness.”
“The Soldier” belongs to the sonnet sequence 1914, written during the first phase of the war. In melodius conventional lines, it expresses what Englishmen generally felt in the autumn of 1914, i.e. a sense of patriotism in face of the ennemy and in defence of their country, and the idealization of those who died in battle. It does not describe anything precise, but only presents a vague generalization of the “war, self-sacrifice, glory” equation, which so deeply affected the young people of these first years. The form itself reflects an abstract view of the war, with no hint at actual horrors or a death, except for the death of the poet himself who, in his romantic idealization, pretends that the earth of the “foreign field” where he lies will be “for ever England”
The soldier [E1]
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.
