The Soldier

            “The Soldier” was one of five sonnets that Brooke composed shortly after the beginning of World War I and published in 1915 with the title 1914, and Other Poems. Written in two stanzas, an octet of eight lines and a sestet of six lines, it is by far his most famous poem, expressing the idealism common throughout the nations of Europe as they eagerly marched to battle in 1914 and felt by Brooke before his own death in April, 1915.
The well-known opening lines represented this romantic notion of consecration through sacrifice by showing the speaker’s transformation after death: “there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is for ever England.” In retrospect, to others the poem came to epitomize the misguided and self-satisfied naïveté that died in the trenches of “no man’s land.” The real war of ugly and often futile death was captured not in Brooke’s work but in the poems by his English contemporaries, such as Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est.”
Yet “The Soldier” is more an elegy of sacrifice than a poem about modern war. It is true that Brooke died before going into battle, but his friendships with English statesman Winston Churchill and other high-ranking politicians had given him knowledge about the destructiveness that industry and technology would bring to the battlefield. There is nothing of that kind of war in the poem. There is also nothing about the reality of dying; the first-person...