Brooke's The Soldier
Transcending Patriotic Service
Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” offers a glimpse of a patriot, serving in his country’s military in loving protection of his country. Many poems that focus on war are the result of the obsession with the grotesqueness that is, without a doubt, a characteristic of armed struggle.
Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and other poems of this flavor have nearly obliterated the light that shines from another focus, that of the patriot, who does his duty and honors his country, his service, and himself, despite the ugliness that killing and dying necessitate.
General William Tecumseh Sherman, of the Union Army serving in the American Civil War, averred, “War is hell!” But as history, including Sherman’s history, clearly demonstrates, sometimes war is sadly indispensable, and those who bravely face the hell that is war perform an invaluable service to their fellow citizens.
Brooke’s poem, “The Soldier,” is a sonnet, and ironically, although Brooke is English, his sonnet is Italian, featuring the rime scheme ABABCDCD in the octave and EFGEFG in the sestet.
Octave: “If I should die, think only this of me”
In the octave, the speaker begins boldly by commanding his listeners, his fellow citizens, to think of him a certain way. He is not asking for them to mourn him but rather to understand his dedication and devotion to their native England. If he dies in battle, he will probably be buried in some foreign land. He thus asks his compatriots to think of that small piece of soil as England.
Because his body will return to the dust from whence it came, he claims that piece of “richer dust” as belonging to England. He can make this bold claim because he has been a citizen “whom England bore.” As one born on English soil, he has been “shaped, made aware” by English culture.
England provided him with “her flowers to love” and “her ways to roam.” His own physical body belonged to England, where he breathed the “English air,” where he was “[w]ashed by the rivers” and “blest by suns of home.”
The speaker demonstrates his loyalty to family and country for which he fights. By claiming for England his own body soil, his loyalty will prevail despite his loss of that body.
Sestet: “And think, this heart, all evil shed away”
The speaker then turns to the ethereal realm of awareness. As his body is dedicated to England, so is his heart and mind. If he dies, he asks that his compatriots realize that “all evil” will be “shed away.” Aware that the human heart is ever at the mercy of evil as long as the soul is encased in the body, he avers that once the soul has left the body, then all of the evil will have vanished.
Without the beating of the heart, the human body is without a pulse, but there is still “[a] pulse in the eternal mind.” His soul will still exist, and he metaphorically likens that soul to the pulse that denotes life in the body. He then proclaims that that soul “pulse” which still contains his thoughts will give “back the thoughts by England given.” As an English citizen, his thoughts are English, and after leaving the body, his soul thoughts will still enshrine the images and intuitions acquired as an Englishman.
That repository that is the soul will also still contain “sights and sounds” and “dreams happy as her day.” His memory also holds the “laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness.” He prayerfully imagines that his friends and family may possess “hearts at peace, under an English heaven.”
The speaker’s service to his fellow citizens transcends the patriotic service his is performing; through this sonnet, the speaker offers a tribute to his country even before it might have the opportunity to pay one to him.
Rupert Brooke
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