20 pages • 40-minute read
The Soldier
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Themes
Modern Elegies for Modern Times
“The Soldier” is among the last English elegies to offer readers traditional elegiac consolation. During WWI, millions were killed by mechanical weapons that hadn’t been used in previous conflicts, and many soldier-poets began to feel that the elegy’s traditional focus on a single death was inadequate to respond to the mass death they’d witnessed.
The task of responding to mass death led many WWI soldier-poets to reject traditional elegiac consolation. In their minds, there was no consolation for the deaths they’d witnessed during the war. As Wilfred Owen, a soldier-poet who fought in the trenches, suffered from PTSD, and was killed a week before the armistice, famously wrote in the “Preface” to the book he was working on, “[T]hese elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory” (Owen, Wilfred. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Edited by C. Day Lewis, New Directions, 1963, p. 31). Like Brooke, Owen used many of the genre conventions established by traditional English elegies, including Milton and Gray. Unlike Brooke, however, Owen deployed these genre conventions ironically, so that instead of offering readers comfort and consolation, Owen’s poems do the opposite—they horrify. The final stanza of Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” for example, includes this shockingly realistic description of a soldier dying after a mustard gas attack: “[T]he white eyes writhing in his face, / His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin” (Owen, Wilfred. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Edited by C. Day Lewis, New Directions, 1963, p. 55). This is an ironic reversal of elegy’s traditional apotheosis of the dead, because the dying soldier is above the poem’s speaker and the rest of the troop (the troop is following “[b]ehind the wagon that we flung him in”), but there is no comfort in this apotheosis, only terror. As Ramazani observes,
Owen forged a new kind of elegy upon the anvil of modern industrialized warfare….Owen’s intense engagement with literary tradition enables, not inhibits, his articulation of a new historical reality of untold psychic trauma (Ramazani, Jahan. The Poetry of Mourning. Chicago University Press, 1994, p. 78).
Moreover, most 20th- and 21st-century elegists have followed Owen’s example, not Brooke’s. “The modern elegist,” Ramazani writes, “tends not to achieve but to resist consolation” (Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning. University of Chicago Press, 1994, xi).
Love and Nationalism
While the soldier-speaker of the poem remains nameless, his country is named repeatedly. The words “England” or “English” appear six times in this 14-line poem and twice on a single line: “A body of England’s, breathing English air” (Line 7). England is, therefore, an important theme of the poem. Just as the soldier-speaker contends that his death in war will claim “some corner of a foreign field” for his country (Line 2), his repeated use of the noun “England” and the related adjective “English” claim this poem for England.
By naming his country repeatedly and not naming himself, the speaker implicitly argues that England is more important than he is. This adds to his explicit argument throughout the poem that dying in battle is worth it because England will live on. The speaker finds compensation for his possible death in the fact that England will survive, expand, and thrive. At the end of the first stanza, the speaker describes loving the British countryside when he was a boy (Lines 6-8). At the beginning of the second stanza, the speaker imagines that after his death, he and his country will be twined. So, his “heart” will “pulse” in the “eternal mind,” and he will return “the thoughts by England given” (Lines 9-11). This merging of man and country in the afterlife leads to the final line: “In hearts at peace, under an English heaven” (Line 14). This ending is only consolatory if the speaker loves his country, which he clearly does. The poem’s sonnet form further connects “The Soldier” with the theme of love, because early sonnets were love poems. (For more on the poem’s form see the “Literary Devices” section.)
Absence of Mourning
Many features of Brooke’s poem tie it to the English elegiac tradition, including the pastoral elements in the first stanza, the discussion of heaven in the second stanza, and the consolation the poem offers readers for the speaker’s death. (For more on the literary context and how “The Soldier” is imitating other elegies, see the “Contextual Analysis” section.) Yet there is one way in which Brooke’s “The Soldier” deviates profoundly from most of the English elegies that came before—the poem does not mourn the death it contemplates.
Most elegies begin with mourning, and although they traditionally end with consolation, these poems typically spend as many lines (or more!) mourning the death as they do offering consolation. In “The Soldier,” however, the speaker does not express any sadness over the possibility of his death. Instead, he skips straight to consolation: “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).
These opening lines of the poem tell readers not to be sad if the soldier dies in battle, because the spot where he dies will be marked “for ever” for his country and England will live on (Line 3). While “The Soldier” does offer readers consolation, and this is in keeping with the English elegiac tradition, it does not mourn. This absence of mourning is pervasive in “The Soldier.” Not a single line expresses any sorrow or sadness.
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