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Criticism

Bruce Meyer

Bruce Meyer is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Toronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and is the author of three collections of poetry. In the following essay, Meyer looks beyond the harsh characterization of “The Soldier” as political rhetoric and instead considers the poem, more positively, in the context of Brooke’s version of “Englandism.”

Of the many poems written during World War I, Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” ranks as one of the most quoted. It is, in many respects, an idealized poem, a sonnet that fails to embrace the horrific realities that were World War I. It is a poem written from the perspective of one who had not seen those realities. It is not to be condemned because it fails to live up to the great and painfully truthful poems of the First World War, such as Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” or “Strange Meeting.” It contains none of the nightmarish observations that Charles Hamilton Sorley recorded in his line “When I see millions of the mouthless dead” or that Frank Prewett supplied in his offhand chronicle of the aftermath of a bombardment: “I put my hand in the breast / Of the first met / His heart thumped, stopped / And I pulled my hand out wet.” Brooke’s poem is an idealized love poem to his country, a sonnet that discourses almost as if in the same vein as Thomas Gray on the nature of death, sacrifice, and national moral values.

“The Soldier” is the final poem in a series of sonnets Brooke titled “1914.” The poems in “1914” were meant to be meditations and reflections on the outbreak of the war that many claimed would be over by Christmas. The six poems — “The Treasure,” “Peace,” “Safety,” “The Dead,” another poem also titled “The Dead,” and “The Soldier” — were meant to study, through the sonnet form, the reason why Englishmen should join the fight. In what amounts to an incomplete “crown” of sonnets (a series of usually seven such poems that study a relationship between a person and an object of affection), Brooke tries to probe the meaning of the war. The problem for the entire “1914” series is that the war really hadn’t happened yet. The reasons for the fight, especially in August of 1914 when Brooke began the sequence, were still rather vague and hazy; in fact, Belgium had just been invaded, but he doesn’t mention that country or its predicament. What Brooke, rather naively, seems to think the fighting is about is the preservation of the English way of life.

In “The Treasure,” for example, Brooke uses the mother-and-child relationship, the quiet that comes from such tenderness and the bond of love between them, as the focus for his discourse. It is almost as if Brooke is waving good-bye to the Edwardian pastoral innocence and calm that made the years leading up to 1914 so idyllic. In “The Treasure,” the children of this motherly figure are “asleep.” In the following poem, “Peace,” the children are “wakened from us sleeping” and are given a “sure, clear eye, and sharpened power.” Brooke hopes that there is “Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace,” yet he knows that the “enemy is Death.” At this juncture, the reader realizes that what the sequence is building is an extended conceit where the awakened children are the flower of English youth and the caring and tender mother is England.

Just as the child is always part of its mother, so the youth who becomes a soldier “is for ever England.” “The Soldier,” in what is often mistaken as nationalist, warmongering rhetoric, is drawing upon the concept of “Englandism,” an identification of the value of England as a moral force in the world. What is English is somehow both apart and above the norm of what one usually sees in the world. “The Soldier” echoes John of Gaunt’s deathbed “This England” speech from Shake-speare’s Richard II and, by allusion, draws on the traditions that were practiced by Blake in his poem “Jerusalem” — a poem that, in itself, draws upon the extended Arthurian myth articulated by Geoffrey of Monmouth in The History of the Kings of England (1135). In that work, one of the prime sources for both English legend and early English history, Monmouth outlines the story of how Joseph of Arimathea came to England with the young Christ and returns to “the sceptred isle” (Shakespeare’s phrase in the mouth of John of Gaunt) with the Holy Grail after the crucifixion. This is the mythic tradition at the root of Englandism. It forms the basis for Blake’s lyric and even finds its way into contemporary cinema in such films as Chariots of Fire and Hope and Glory. The fact that the soldier’s grave

“Brooke’s poem is an idealized love poem to his country, a sonnet that discourses ... on the nature of death, sacrifice, and national moral values.”

in Brooke’s poem is “for ever England” is not jingoistic war rhetoric but the assertion of the persona’s context in a much broader, richer, and even timeless tradition of mythopoeia.

What mistakenly can be read for sentimental nationalism and moribund self-prophetic sacrifice in the poem (“If I should die think only this of me”) is, in reality, the martyrdom aspect of Englandism. On one hand, Englandism is a pastoral ideal, a bucolic vision of a “demi-paradise.” On the other hand, however, it is the full-blown system of temporal pastoralism where a dead youth (Milton’s Lycidas) and a martyred saint (St. Alban or St. George) cause a profound absence in nature that must be grieved and fraught with the need for solace. Like the martyr saints in Christian hagiology, the soldier is purified, like Sir Galahad, before he offers himself as a lamb to the slaughter (“And think, this heart, all evil shed away”). In this aspect of Englandism, the champion, the willing victim who nobly gives his life for his country, is seen not just as the embodiment of England (“a body of England’s”) but also as a moral extension of all that is right in the universe (“an English heaven”) and morally manifested in the rightest possible place imaginable — England. That is why Brooke places the dead soldier “under an English heaven.” He is not necessarily saying that God is English. What he is saying is that the best example of Godliness is evident in England and that his motherland, the mother of the earlier sonnets in the sequence, is a reflection of heaven. It is high praise for one’s nation, but that is exactly the line taken by John of Gaunt in his famous speech and the perception that lies just one step beyond Milton’s “Lycidas” and A. E. Housman’s dead runner in ‘To An Athlete Dying Young”; the only alteration is that the dead pastoral hero is a representative of the national ethic.

Brooke chooses to couch his ruminations in the sonnet form, that very gentlemanly, meditative, and refined upper-class form of poetry. The sonnet, one need not be reminded, is a discursive form of poetry. It is not a lyric; yet the situation Brooke is discussing in the poem does not call for singing but rather for examination, argument, and thought. The sacrifice that is about to take place is an act of passion, not an act of reason. The sonnet, with its presentation of a problem or consideration in the octave, and its pursuit of a solution in the sestet, is ideally matched to Brooke’s discourse. “The Soldier” is not a song but a supposition. It begins with that very Kiplingesque word, “If” and then imagines what the consequences would be in a cause-and-effect structure. The opening octave is that of a regular English or Shakespearean sonnet, with its alternating rhyme. The problem is, essentially, as the poem’s form suggests, an English problem. The solution is even more English. Brooke draws on the Miltonic sestet to finish the poem and to provide the conclusion with its efg efg rhyme scheme. One has to question why he would vary the form in the final six lines, but the answer is quite simple: Milton used his sestet for the consideration of holy or spiritual matters. The repeating trios are, in fact, little Trinities of rhetoric. Rather than maintain the alternating rhyme, the pair of trios raises the poem above the level of a physical concern and into the realm of a spiritual matter. This effect in the cause-and-effect structure that Brooke establishes is a matter not of this world but of “heaven.” “Heaven,” as the poem has suggested, is not just a place in the sky where God resides, but another little slice of potential Englishness. If the grave is English because it contains the physical remains of the English martyr, then why should heaven not be English if it contains the spiritual remains of that same pastoral hero?

It is easy to see why critics of World War I poetry, such as Paul Fussell, have given Brooke’s poem (and John McCrae’s “In Flanders’ Field”) a royal thumbs down. It is easy to mistake this sonnet as a piece of political rhetoric and to overlook the much broader traditions that such poems draw upon. The problem with “The Soldier” and how it is read today by critics and poetry readers is, in many ways, the sad result of how Rupert Brooke played out his role in the First World War. After Brooke’s death, “The Soldier” was taken up as a banner by a jingoistic public eager to find mythic meaning in the slaughter of youth that was taking place all over Europe. Brooke did not help matters. As Edward Marsh points out in his “Memoir” of Brooke, the young warrior-poet/Hugh Grant look-alike died on St. George’s Day (April 23) — the feast of the soldier martyr who happens to be the patron saint of England. April 23 is also the most literary day in the English calendar: it is reputedly the day of Shakespeare’s birth and the day of both Tennyson and Wordsworth’s deaths. It is the one day that somehow seems to embody “Englandism.” As poems go, “The Soldier” suffers from its smaller context — from the death of Brooke, its timing, its war. What should be remembered is its broader context, the attempt of the poet to position his experience in a very broad mythic and literary context, and to develop and implement an extended metaphor that the poet needed to address his world.

Source: Bruce Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

Chris Semansky

Chris Semansky’s most recent collection of poems, Blindsided, has been published by 26 Books of Portland, Oregon. In the following essay Semansky examines “The Soldier” as an example of sentimental literature.

“The Soldier,” an example of sentimental literature, is a poem that functioned to elicit public sympathy and support for British troops during a very difficult period in World War I. Written while Brooke was on leave during Christmas of 1914, and published along with a handful of other Brooke war sonnets in the magazine New Numbers in January of 1915, “The Soldier” was subsequently read by the Dean of St. Paul’s church as part of his Easter Sunday service in April of 1915. Brooke already had a budding poetic reputation, having been part of a circle of intellectuals, politicians, and writers that included Virginia Woolfe, Lytton Strachey, Violet Asquith, G. K. Chesterton, Henry James, John Masefield, William Butler Yeats, Bernard Shaw, James Barrie, Edward Marsh, and Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty. The reading of Brooke’s poem helped to solidify his reputation and to create an idealized image of the young British soldier in the public imagination. This image was part of the representation that poet Wilfred Owen later referred to as the “old Lie” in his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est.”

Sentimental literature uses clichés and commonplace phrases or images to appeal to the feelings of readers — generally, feelings to which they are often already predisposed. Hallmark cards, for example, invariably use sentimental “verse,” as does much genre writing, such as romance novels.There is nothing inherently wrong with sentimental literature; such writing often has the best chance of appealing to the broadest range and largest number of people. Many Hollywood movies work on the same principle, in that the most successful films recycle the same plots and themes because they have been successful before. Brooke’s poem was well received because it asked its readers to do something that they were already prepared to do: honor the soldiers who were fighting and dying for their country. Just a few months before Dean Inge read Brooke’s poem in church, Britain was bombed for the first time, and in February, Germany announced that British waters were a “war zone.” British emotion ran high as the country was now under siege, and patriotic and nationalist sentiment was strong. Brooke’s poem did not employ any elaborate conceits or difficult rhetorical strategies, but was fairly straightforward in its expressed love of England. The speaker did not ask readers to mourn for him or to pity him, but, in the spirit of self-sacrifice, asked only that he be remembered for being English:

If I should die, think only this of me:
 
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
 
That is forever England....

Such uncomplicated loyalty to the motherland appealed to British readers, and the issue of the journal in which “The Soldier” and Brooke’s other war sonnets appeared, New Numbers, quickly sold out. Adding to the poems’ appeal was Brooke’s own reputation. He had already published a collection of poetry, Poems, in 1911 and assisted Edward Marsh in editing the popular anthology Georgian Poetry in 1913. His image as a golden-haired, athletic, Tatented Adonis was well established, especially with the literati of British society. That he should also be fighting for his country only added to his appeal. Remarking on the poem’s capacity to work on the emotions, biographer John Lehmann observed: “The movement of the argument and the tone are both flawless, and one can easily see how in the anxious, emotional mood of the early months of the war it could bring tears to a sensitive eye.” However, Lehmann also acknowledged in Rupert Brooke, His Life and His Legend that timing had much to do with the poem’s initial reception, saying that “looked at dispassionately today, it is difficult not to feel that it is riddled with sentimentality and narcissistic fantasy, whatever he may have meant in imagining himself ‘a pulse in the eternal mind’ purified of all unworthy thought and feeling.”

Lehmann’s point about timing is another way of saying that what’s schmaltz today may have been gold yesterday. The definition of cliché, after all, is a word or phrase that has lost its freshness or vigor through overuse. Brooke’s schmaltziness, however, is also based on his overuse of abstractions. But abstractions were also more tolerated in Brooke’s day than they are today, close to a century later, when a poem’s success is largely measured on its capacity to effectively marshal concrete imagery. Abstractions are words that denote attributes of a person or thing. For example, when Brooke writes, “And think, this heart, all evil shed away,” he uses the word “evil” in an abstract sense, because he is not naming how his heart is evil or providing an instance of its evilness. We cannot see his evilness; we are only told that it has been so. If he were to make this sentence concrete, he would provide a description of the attribute of evilness that allows readers to see, hear, touch, or feel it. He would have the image appeal to our senses. For example, if he had written, “And think, this heart, which desires to bayonet each German soldier / until they scream, their blood gushing from their hearts ...,” he would be using concrete imagery that we can (imaginatively) experience with our senses. Choosing the language of abstraction, however, also enables Brooke to be representative — to write for all soldiers.

It was also the representative nature of the poem to which later poets and critics objected. As the war continued and British soldiers continued to die in horrible and often senseless battles, the idealism of Brooke’s poem grew less and less enchanting. Indeed, Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” written two years after Brooke’s and after Owen himself had seen considerable combat, came to be considered the real index of a soldier’s experience. The success of Owen’s poem was due primarily to two reasons: 1) it was initially published after the war (1920), and the full brunt of human loss had sunk in; and 2) it was composed of concrete imagery, which allowed readers to visualize the horror. The first four lines show us a soldier’s experience, instead of telling us what it was like:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed
      through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

These images allow us to inhabit the mind and body of the soldier, to feel his weariness and his hopelessness. We can see the soldiers tramping through the mud and feel the straining of their congested lungs. We can do this because we believe that the speaker of the poem has experienced the things that he describes. Owen’s poem, an indictment of the senselessness of war and the premodern sentiment that Brooke expresses of dying in glory for one’s country, resonated with readers, soldiers and citizens alike, because it matched their understanding and experience of the war. His last lines of the poem, “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori,” (“It is sweet and becoming to die for one’s country”) can be read, then, as a rebuttal both to Brooke’s naivete about the physical realities of war and about the loyalties that one should have to one’s country. It is ironically fitting, in a way, that Brooke, a member of the privileged classes who grew up with almost every advantage, should write a poem representative of a soldier’s experience when he saw so little of the war (only one day of actual combat, when he helped in the evacuation of Antwerp). That he relied on abstractions and clichés to carry the weight of the poems makes sense if we read the poem in this light. But it doesn’t make the poem any better.

Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• Christopher Hassall’s authorized 1972 biography of Brooke is comprehensive, scholarly, and detailed. This is a must read for anyone interested in Brooke’s life.
• Brooke’s Collected Poems (1922) includes an intriguing introduction by poet Gavin Ewart and a passionate memoir written by friend and patron Edward Marsh shortly after Brooke’s death.
• Paul Fussell’s study of language, modernism, and World War I, The Great War and Modern Memory, theorizes that a more pervasive irony was one of the results of the First World War. Fussell sees Brooke’s reputation as a war poet as being perhaps one of the greatest ironies, as Brooke saw almost no war action and wrote only a handful of poems about war. Fussell also examines a host of words that entered the English language in the aftermath of World War I.
• For an understanding of America’s relationship to Great Britain during World War I read Ross Gregory’s 1972 study, The Origins of American Intervention in the First World War.