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).