Rupert Brooke, “The soldier” (1915)

Rupert Brooke is an English war poet known for his

idealistic was sonnets written during the Firs World
War. He is remembered for inspiring patriotism in
the early moment of the Great War; however, he
never experienced combat first hand. He joined
the Royal Naval Volunteers but developed Sepols
from a mosquito bite and died on his way to his first
battle to Gallipoli. On April 4, 1915, Dean Inge of St
. Paul’s Cathedral read a sonnet as a part of his Easter
Sunday Sermon. The sermon was published in The Times
, and the sonnet there in was described as “an
important document of national preparation of war”.
Rupert Brooke’s sonnet ‘The Recruit’ (The soldier) was
the last in a sonnet sequence entitled ’1914’ which were
first published in New Numbers (number 4) in January
of 1915 .The sonnet form was 14 lines of iambic
pentameter, divided into an octave which is rhymed
after the Shakespearen/Elizabethan (ababcdcd)
rhyme scheme and a sestet which follows the Petrarchan
/Italian (efgefg).It enjoin the reader to imagine the
blissful state of the fallen soldier. Brooke invokes th
e ideas of spiritual cleansing, inviolable memories of the
dead, a hero’s immortal legacy, and he combines all
these specifically under the overarching framework
of English heritage and personal loyalty to it. The
sonnet form of this poem suits Brooke’s idealistic
patriotism and sentimentalism because of its inherent
neat and regular structure. It is opened with “if” which
directs to the imaginary situation the persona describes.
It highlights the idea of a dreamlike vision of glorious
death that is evoked in it. The poet uses “I” as the
persona which gives a personal edge. The heroism and
intense patriotism emerges as there is no trace of
regret in the poet’s tone as he talk about his imagined
death when he says” If I..England” How his death
with enrich another land with English spirit and how
self-sacrifice such as dying for your country is
celebrated. It also shows how great he thinks the
English people are but since the poem is placed in the
first person singular it brings out a sense of vainness
that the poet probably has to be saying that he
has richer dust which means richer ashes “In that rich
..concealed” Rupert personify England as a mother
figure”A dust..aware” England is portrayed as a carrying
, nurturing force and you think that fighting for your
country, you’d simply be repaying a mother’s love.
England is a beautiful woman who has given a great deal
to her child; she has given “her flowers to love…roam”.
It is emphasized as the focal point of the poem and the
main receptor of the persona is love. It’s personified as
nature (unspoiled, pure, and not evil). This brings out the
theme of Honors, nationalism, Patriotism and happy to
die for ones country. A feeling of peace, perfection,
tranquillity and unity with nature is evoked by idyllic
image conjured by the lines”A body…home” In the sestet,
death is presented as resulting in the soldier’s heart
gaining a purity and freedom from evil”this heart..way”.
His land is the greatest of good and he is spiritually
cleansed and his heart will instead become”a pulse.mind”
A sense of repayment is created in the final lines.
A final idyllic picture of Engalnd is painted as full of
 “Laugther”, good company and “Gentleness” In going
to fight, a soldier can repay his country for those
great gifts received and discover true”heart at
peace”. He evokes positive feelings towards the war
and describes optimistically the soldiers’ thought
once the war has finished by using “happy dreams”
ans “Laughter” He says those words as it will be
a great experience in which the soldiers will fight
and will comeback home with incredible stories to
tell their friends.

On April 4, 1915, Dean Inge of St. Paul’s Cathedral read a sonnet as a part of his Easter Sunday Sermon. The
sermon was published in The Times, and the sonnet there in was described as “an important document of national
preparation of war”. Rupert Brooke’s sonnet ‘The Recruit’ (The soldier) was the last in a sonnet sequence entitled
’1914’ which were first published in New Numbers (number 4) in January of 1915 .The sonnet form was 14 lines of
iambic pentameter, divided into an octave which is rhymed after the Shakespearen/Elizabethan (ababcdcd)
rhyme scheme and a sestet which follows the Petrarchan/Italian (efgefg).It enjoin the reader to imagine the
blissful state of the fallen soldier. Brooke invokes the ideas of spiritual cleansing, inviolable memories of the
dead, a hero’s immortal legacy, and he combines all these specifically under the overarching framework of English
heritage and personal loyalty to it. An example of Georgian poetry in its glorification of war. The soldier praises
the idea of dying in battle for England and upholds the idea of celebrating the nation rather focussing on the
horror of being killed in combat. In the first stanza of his poem, the soldier says that if he died, there will
be”some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England (2-3) Instead of focusing on the disenchanting aspect
of his rotting corpse, Brooke treats the death of his soldier as though his body is a flag that is meant to mark
the field as being conquered by England. He describes acknowledges how the soldier honors England by dying in
the process of defending the nation.An example of Georgian poetry in its glorification of war. The soldier praises
the idea of dying in battle for England and upholds the idea of celebrating the nation rather focussing on the
horror of being killed in combat. In the first stanza of his poem, the soldier says that if he died, there will
be”some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England (2-3) Instead of focusing on the disenchanting aspect
of his rotting corpse, Brooke treats the death of his soldier as though his body is a flag that is meant to mark
the field as being conquered by England. He describes acknowledges how the soldier honors England by dying in
the process of defending the nation.
Wilfred Owen”Exposure” (1918)
The poem gives a worm’s-eye view of the front line, based on Owen’s experiences in the winter of 1917 and
passive suffering is what it is all about. ’Nothing happens’ except the weather and the progress of the war. The
men trapped in a No Man’s Land between life and death, and the poem’s movement is circular. ‘What are we doing
here?(verse 2). They are lying in the open under freezing conditions, with some psychological force forbidding
them to get up and walk away. The parallel is with hanging on a cross, and verse 7 examines the possibility that
they are suffering for others. Two literary influences: ‘Our brains ache’ echoes ‘my hearts aches’, the first words
of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, by Owen’s beloved Keats. But he was aware that his generation was living through
horrors which the Romantics had not dreamed of, poetry had to change. Ivor Novello’s song, ‘Keep the home fires
burning…though your lads are far away they dream of home’ But in his dream of home, the fire are almost dead.
‘Crusted dark-red jewels, an example of the care Owen takes with small phrases. The house has been deserted by
its human inhabitants and verse 6 suggests the no welcomed of the young men when they returned. They are
compelled and expected to stay where they are. Verse 7 appears o suggest that men are Christ-figures, dying
willingly for the sake of other. The simple Christianity which he had once believed seems inappropriate. The last
verse suggests that one more night in the open will finish them off. The final version of the poem belongs to
September 1918, and it is mature and brilliant work. There are some daring half-rhymes-‘knive us/nervous’ which
come off hanging line at the end of each verse.

MODERNIST NOVEL
The English novel was bourgeois in its origins
, and throughout the 18th and 19th centuries it
was anchored in a social world, patterning its
plots in terms of gain or loss of social status or
fortune. Whatever was important in a
character’s fictional life was registered by
public symbols as social, financial or institutional
change. This presentation by the novelist of his
world as a wholly objective world determined in
large manner his technique. The loss of the
confident sense of a common world, of a public
view of what was significant in human action, ad
an effect on the themes and techniques of fiction.
James Joyce’s view of the epiphany, the sudden
realization an incident or situation or object
encountered in daily experience has an intense
symbolic meaning. The construction of a plot pattern
and private interpretations take the novel out of
the public arena of value in which it had hitherto
moved. The novelist’s principle of selection and
sense of significant or of presenting a world which
did not depend on any single criterion of significance
at all but in which everything interpenetrated
everything else and the same event or character
became important or trivial as the author’s view
and way of presentation kept shifting. A series of
moments moving forward in a steady progress which
generally involved taking the hero through a
sequence of testing circumstances in chronological
order would cease to satisfy. The truth about a
character is the sum of his whole emotional experience
. It is not necessary to take a character through a
series of testing circumstances to reveal the whole
human truth about him; the proper exploration of his
consciousness at any given moment in a very short
space of time could reveal all his history and all his
potentialities. For on this view a man is his history,
nothing is lost, and his reaction to every new event i
s conditioned by the sum of his reactions to all
earlier events. Henry James brought a new precision
and complexity into description of the states of mind.
But it was not until the 1910s and 1920s that the full
impact of the 3 factors just discussed made itself
felt on the technique and themes of fiction. The
phrase stream of consciousness refers to the
flow of impressions, perceptions, and thoughts which
stream unbidden through our minds. The fragmentation
of narration is presented by unusual cohesion, or
changes in normal ways of linking sentences,
paragraphs, and narration. This leads to unusual jumps,
juxtapositions, and connections, marked by unusual or
missing punctuation, which can create unexpected
visual or graphological effects on the page. Stream
of consciousness takes these effects to extremes
, abandoning cohesion, syntax and punctuation lexical
correctness which previously brought order and clarity
to narration.

MODERNIST POETRY
It has emerged in the early years of the 20th
century with the appearance of the Imagists
which rejected the sentiment and discursiveness
typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry.
 Imagism favoured precision of imagery, and clear
sharp language. In general, the modernists saw
themselves as looking back to the best practices of
poets in earlier periods and other cultures like
ancient Greek literature, Chinese and Japanese
poetry, the troubadours, Dante and the medieval
Italian philosophical poets and the English Metaphysical
poets.It is characterized by 2 main features: writing technical
innovation through the extensive use of free verse
and an unproblematic poetic ‘self’ directly addressing
an equally unproblematic ideal reader or audience.
Much of the early poetry take the form of short,
compact lyrics. However, as modernist poetry in
English developed, longer poems which represent the
contribution of the modernist movement to the 20th
century English poetic canon. The questioning of
the self and the exploration of technical innovations
in modernist poetry are intimately interconnected.
The dislocation of the authorial presence is
achieved through techniques as collage, found poetry,
the juxtaposition of apparently unconnected materials,
and the combinations of these. These techniques open
up questions in mind of the reader regarding the
nature of the poetic experience. The most famous
English-language work is T.S. Eliot’s poem The waste
Land (1922). Eliot was an American poet who was admired
by Pound, who, helped him to publish a poem, The
love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which brought him
to prominence. When he completed the original draft
of a long poem he gave the manuscript to Pound for
comment. Eliot came to be seen as the voice of a generation.
The addition of notes to the published poem served to
highlight the use of collage as a literary technique,
paralleling similar practice by the cubists and other
visual artists, Modernism Tended towards a poetry
of the fragment that rejected the idea that the
poet could present a comfortingly coherent view of
life. The waste land is a highly influential 434-line
modernist poem. Despite the alleged obscurity of
the poem-its shifts between satire and prophecy,
its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker,
location and time, its elegiac but intimidating
summoning up of a vast and dissonant range
of cultures and literatures-the poem has become
a familiar touchstone of modern literature. Among
its famous phrases are in the first and last lines. The
style of the work grows out of his interest like the
music hall. Its poem follows the pattern of the musical
fugue. But the most distinctive feature of the poem’s style
is the disjointed nature of it, the way it jumps from
one adopted manner to another and the way it moves
between different voices and makes use of phrases in
foreign languages. Sources from which Eliot quotes or
to which he alludes include the work of: homer,
Sophocles, shakespeare, virgil, spenser, conrad...
and to many scriptural writings