Self-Delusion: The Beautiful War of Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke’s 1915 poem “The Soldier” may have been just what the boys of England needed to get through the war. The poem portrays not the loud, clanging glory of the battlefield, but a different kind of war-glory: a quieter kind that persists long after the war is over, and long after some boys have gone home while others remain forever. Brooke’s poem is addressed to the loved ones of the speaker, who is a soldier; the poem is, then, spoken entirely to his wife, family, or close friends. He calmly acknowledges his own imminent death, but not to focus on himself; rather, he intends to instruct his loved ones on what to do: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England” (lines 1-3). The scariest part of any war throughout the ages has always been the sense of ceasing to be. On a personal level, the young man in question will die. But countries, ideologies, revolutions, cultures, and ways of life are all truly mortal, and never more so than during wartime. But Brooke reassures his audience that England, unlike all those mortal, worry-filled boys on the lines, can never die, since “some corner of a foreign field,” unnamed and unmarked, will nevertheless be “forever England,” and it will forever espouse English beliefs and ideals. By this poem’s inception, cynicism had already entered the war, and it would be long years before the war came to a close. But Rupert Brooke’s nameless soldier does not let those thoughts enter into his mind; he merely reminds himself and his loved ones that England is more important than any of them.

Along with the immortality of England comes its glorification through praise. The speaker of this poem is a righteous, patriotic, upstanding citizen who is worthy of public admiration; however, he credits his country with all. He claims himself nothing more than “A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, / Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam” (lines 5-6). All of this boy’s goodness and greatness he owes to a country even more good and great that made him that way. Love for his country, gratefulness at having been “A body of England’s, breathing English air, / Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home” (lines 7-8), and awe at merely being allowed to represent England in the great conflict all enable this speaker to reassure his family so much.

Brooke ignores the realistically bloody parts of war, however. His speaker “shall be / In that rich earth a richer dust concealed” (lines 3-4), saying nothing of the mangled, disfigured, bloody corpses that actually lay strewn about the battlefield. By the end of the poem, the man is nothing more than his “heart, all evil shed away, / A pulse in the Eternal mind” (lines 9-10). In truth, bodies piled high littered the battlefield, as shown in photos and in more realistic descriptions of the war. Brooke, however, chooses to ignore that gritty reality so that he can focus instead on the poetic, even beautiful parts of war. Dying, for him, is a chance to “[give] somewhere back the thoughts by England given, / Her sights and sounds; / dreams happy as her day” (lines 11-12), an opportunity at which he elates. The final line of the poem labels the man as a “[heart] at peace, under an English heaven” (line 14). In truth, it is the man’s now-useless body, lying gory and lifeless with no-one to comfort him, who lies under the supposed “English heaven.” Yet the speaker’s instructions were clear from the beginning: his loved ones should “think only this” and nothing more of him: that, however terrible his conditions of life or death may be, that he is forever England, which is forever strong.