The Soldier

Rupert Brooke

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1915

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Pastoral

The first stanza of the poem contains many pastoral elements, including a “field” (Line 2), “rich earth” (Line 4), “flowers” (Line 5), “ways to roam” (Line 5), “air” (Line 7), “rivers” (Line 8), and “suns of home” (Line 8). These elements clearly indicate that the soldier-speaker imagines himself dying in a bucolic, countryside setting. The pastoral setting is incredibly important in English elegy, and this motif invokes earlier elegies. (For more on the literary context and how “The Soldier” is imitating other elegies, see the “Contextual Analysis” section.) The idealized countryside setting that Brooke imagines in this poem is also very different from the realities of WWI.

Heaven

While the first stanza begins where most traditional English elegies begin (in a pastoral landscape), the second stanza ends where most traditional elegies end: in heaven. In the final stanza, the speaker’s heart beats on “in the eternal mind” (Line 10), and the poem ends “under an English heaven” (Line 14). Heaven is an important motif in the poem, because it is one of the ways the speaker offers consolation for his possible death. His death is not so sad because, as well as England expanding, the soldier-speaker will live on in heaven.

Thinking

Both stanzas of “The Soldier” begin with an instruction to the reader to “think” (Lines 1 and 9). These instructions mark the poem as a mental exercise. In the poem, the soldier-speaker is telling readers how to mentally cope with his death, if he dies during WWI. The word “think” is on the first line of both stanzas and colors everything that comes after it. It is also important to note that Brooke’s conception of what WWI was like was largely theoretical. Brooke only participated in one day of very limited fighting before his death, and he wasn’t killed in combat—he died on a hospital ship from sepsis. Most scholars and historians agree that Brooke’s conception of WWI was incredibly inaccurate, but because Brooke died just a few months after the war began and never made it to the frontline, thinking is pretty much all he had to base “The Soldier” on.