The soldier rupert brooke when was it written

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The Soldier Full Text. Lines It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust conceal'd; 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. Wash'd by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

The Soldier was written while Brooke was on leave at Christmas, ; it was the final sonnet in a collection of five that he entitled "" - his reflections on the outbreak of war. They were first published in the magazine New Numbers in January Rupert Brooke never experienced front-line combat, but was sailing for Gallipoli with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force when he contracted blood poisoning from a mosquito bite.

Writing at the start of the war, Brooke prefigured the vast numbers of soldiers whose bodies, torn to shreds or buried by shellfire, would remain buried and unknown as a result of the methods of fighting that war.

It has been accused, not without merit, of idealizing and romanticizing war, and stands in stark contrast to the poetry of Wilfred Owen — Religion is central to the second half of "The Soldier," expressing the idea that the soldier will awake in a heaven as a redeeming feature for his death in war.

The poem also makes great use of patriotic language: it is not any dead soldier, but an "English" one, written at a time when to be English was considered by the English as the greatest thing to be. The soldier in the poem is considering his own death but is neither horrified nor regretful. Rather, religion, patriotism, and romanticism are central to distracting him. An established poet before the outbreak of World War I, Rupert Brooke had traveled, written, fallen in and out of love, joined great literary movements, and recovered from a mental collapse all before the declaration of war, when he volunteered for the Royal Naval Division.

He saw combat action in the fight for Antwerp in , as well as a retreat. As he awaited a new deployment, he wrote the short set of five War Sonnets, which concluded with one called The Soldier. Soon after he was sent to the Dardanelles, where he refused an offer to be moved away from the front lines—an offer sent because his poetry was so well-loved and good for recruiting—but died on April 23rd, of blood poisoning from an insect bite that weakened a body already ravaged by dysentery.

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