The life and legacy of Rupert Brooke, the soldier-poet

What was Rupert Brooke's early life like?

Rupert Brooke was considered to be endowed with a sunny personality and strikingly good-looking appearance. But what made him even more famous was his Byronic death on a Greek island.

As a matter of fact, in his early poems he expressed his favour of the upcoming war that he would have certainly described with less romantic enthusiasm and more mature disillusionment if he had lived longer.

Rupert Brooke was born at Rugby on the 3rd of August 1887 and he studied at King's College, Cambridge. He published his first volume, Poems, in 1911 in the style of the Georgian School.

At the outbreak of the war, full of enthusiasm, he enlisted at once as an officer, then he joined the Dardanelles expedition and at the end he died of blood poisoning because of a infected mosquito bite, on the island of Skyros, on April 23rd, 1915.
He was buried in an olive grove, a place chosen by his friend William Denis Browne.

Brooke's romantic symbolism

He was strikingly handsome and good-looking which, together with his fervent idealism and legendary death, turned him into a romantic symbol of soldier-poet.

This is an example of one of his poems about his glorious death. It is called The soldier. It was written in 1914 and it was supposed to be the fifth sonnet of the collection of five sonnets, 1914. At the end it was published posthumously in 1915.

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

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.

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-poet's legacy

The poem expresses what Englishmen generally felt in the autumn of 1914, especially focusing on a sense of patriotism and a will to face and defeat the enemies in order to be able to defend their country.

Another theme is the the idealization of those who died in battle. On the other hand, the verses does not describe anything precise, but they only presents a vague generalization of the "war, sacrifice, glory" equation, which so deeply affected the young people of those first years, the so called Lost Generation by Gertrude Stein, the people who were born between 1882 and 1900.

The form itself reflects an abstract view of the war, with no hint at actual horrors of the death in the war field, except for the death of the poet himself who, in his romantic idealization, pretends that the earth of the "foreign field" where he lies will be "for ever England".