Critique of The Soldier by Rupert Brooke, British Poet

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Let’s have a look at the poem. Scroll down and read it first, and then come back to my next sentence. The poet tells us: ‘If I should die, etc.’ to only think of him as some spot in a faraway land, in this case England. It could have been China, the US, the Bahamas, you name it. The point is that it is already far away in time and in place. The soldier is looking back at images and impressions of his youth spent in that far land, England where he was born and lived most of his life. The imagery of his country and his entire existence is almost miraculously receding more and more and yet seems almost palpably close and present: ‘the rich earth’, ‘her flowers’, ‘the rivers’, ‘English air’, and more abstractly: ‘a pulse in the eternal mind’, ‘the thoughts by England given’, ‘dreams happy as her day’, ‘laughter’, ‘gentleness’, ‘hearts at peace’ and all ‘under an English heaven’.

He asks us also: ‘And think, this heart, all evil shed away,’… What could this state of mind be other than the very moment of dying? Although the poem starts with a premonition, and, if this or that should happen, he’s actually describing how he’s taking leave of everything he has known, everything he remembers of England as both he and England are fading away and he’s being buried in the earth where he too shall lie, but not England’s. He describes for us in very poetic ways how life is slowly coming to a standstill, but gently, with happiness and a fond memory of laughter and ease, and where nothing remains in the end but a thought (ours, his?) like a whiff ‘under an English heaven’.

O my dear American poet and critic whose name I shall not mention here, you who have passed away as well and are now also in that far land. I take it you’ve been discussing the true merits of this poem with its maker Rupert Brooke at least once since. When I too take off to that abode someday, I hope to join the conversation.

The Soldier by 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.

Rupert Brooke, 1914

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Source by Freddy Niagara Fonseca