The Soldier

Shortly after WWI broke out, Brooke began work on a series of “War Sonnets.” This series, including “The Soldier,” was published under the title 1914 and Other Poems shortly after Brooke’s death. Most critics and scholars classify “The Soldier” as a pre-war poem because there is a stark contrast between the war “The Soldier” describes and the reality of WWI. This divergence begins with the opening lines: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England” (Lines 1-3).

The use of the word “field” (Line 2) conjures an image of a pastoral battlefield, an image the speaker extends and elaborates on: “There shall be / [i]n that rich earth a richer dust concealed” (Lines 3-4). The phrase “rich earth” (Line 4) suggests the soldier is fighting in a fertile, fecund field in the countryside.

This opening image of a pastoral setting, a battlefield with the emphasis on the field part of the word, leads the soldier-speaker to remember his childhood roaming the bucolic English countryside:

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 (Lines 5-8).

These final lines of the first stanza are temporally distinct from the opening lines. While the opening lines imagine “If I should die” (an event that has not yet happened, but could possibly happen [Line 1]), the closing lines of the first stanza recollect the speaker’s childhood (an event that is past). Yet like the opening lines, these final lines of the first stanza conjure images of the pastoral. Therefore, the first stanza encourages readers to imagine the soldier-speaker dying in a pastoral setting, like the English countryside where he grew up.

In fact, most battlefields in WWI existed in the bombed-out and barren space between enemy trenches known as No Man’s Land. In just one British attack, four million shells were fired before ground troops were ordered onto the battlefield. These shells ensured that the ground the soldiers marched out onto was cratered, stripped of vegetation, and treacherous. As Paul Fussell describes in The Great War and Modern Memory:

The bombardment churned up the ground; rain fell and turned the dirt to mud. In the mud the British assaulted until the attack finally attenuated three and a half months later. Price: 370,000 British dead and wounded and sick and frozen to death. Thousands literally drowned in the mud (Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 17).

The first stanza of “The Soldier” doesn’t offer an accurate description of how most soldiers died during WWI. This stanza also doesn’t offer an accurate description of how Brooke died, since Brooke perished not on a battlefield or even on dry land, but on a hospital ship prior to ever seeing frontline combat.

While the first stanza of “The Soldier” imagines what will happen to the speaker’s body if he dies in battle (Lines 1-4), the second stanza imagines what will happen to his soul. First, the soldier-speaker imagines that death in war will purify him: “And think, this heart, all evil shed away, / A pulse in the eternal mind, no less” (Lines 9-10). Next, he images that even in the “eternal mind,” he will continue to be English: “Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given” (Line 11). Finally, he imagines that, even after dying in battle, his thoughts of his country will continue to be happy and peaceful: “Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; / And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, / In hearts at peace, under an English heaven” (Lines 12-14).

While no one, including the speaker of this poem, knows for sure what happens after death, many soldiers who fought in WWI developed post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, a mental condition that during WWI was termed “shell shock.” This condition was often brought about by witnessing other soldiers die in horrific and gruesome ways. Soldiers with PTSD experienced intense and disturbing thoughts and often had vivid flashbacks that forced them to relive the most awful moments of their war experience. The idea Brooke’s speaker expresses at the beginning of the second stanza, that death during war is a mental and emotional purifier, would have seemed ludicrous to soldiers suffering from PTSD.

Moreover, many soldiers who fought in WWI began to see the war as intractable and unwinnable, and therefore purposeless; which, in fact, it was. In the summer of 1917, Siegfried Sassoon, a poet and an injured soldier, wrote the following in a letter that was before the House of Commons on July 30 and printed in The London Times on July 31:

I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers, I believe this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible for them to be changed without our knowledge, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation (Sassoon, Siegfried. "A Soldier's Declaration." 1917. BYU Library).

This letter was read before the British House of Commons, and while Sassoon’s letter did not single-handedly end WWI, it did express the sentiments of many soldiers who had fought in the war.

Far from the decisive victory for England that Brooke’s poem imagines, the winner of WWI could not be determined in battle. Instead, peace had to be negotiated. The Treaty of Versailles brought WWI to a close, but instead of establishing a lasting peace, the unequal terms of that treaty are often cited as a contributing cause of WWII. Thus, the last line of Brooke’s poem, “In hearts at peace, under an English heaven” (Line 14), does not accurately portray the war it was written about.

Both stanzas of “The Soldier” begin with an instruction to the reader to “think” (Lines 1 and 9). The poem is an urge to picture and imagine the soldier-speaker’s death in war. It’s also theoretical, since Brooke never experienced frontline combat. Moreover, the way “The Soldier” describes death in battle is so incongruous with the realities of WWI that most critics classify Brooke’s poem as an example of how people thought and felt prior to WWI, not after.