Comment on The Soldier by Rupert Brooke

This is perhaps Brooke’s best known poem.

Composed in a small field notebook in 1914 while he was serving in the Royal Naval Division, it was named as number five due to its position in a five-poem sonnet sequence. Sadly, Brooke was unable to enjoy its fame as it was quoted in a sermon in St. Paul's church, London, on Easter Sunday 1915 shortly after Brooke's death, to a rapturous welcome.

This tone continued in the immediate aftermath of Brooke’s death, when the poem was seized upon as a much-needed patriotic boost by a British government and populace who were already beginning to realise the true horror of the first world war, and from this moment on Brooke’s place in the history books as a poet of exceptional, some would say unfulfilled promise was assured.

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.

1914

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