Thoughts on war: Rupert Brooke – The Soldier (Published on 16/06/2026)
The Soldier
by Rupert Brooke
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.
(source: Poems of the Great War 1914-1918 [Penguin Books, 1998], p. 17)
Rupert Chawner Brooke, born on 03/08/1887 in Rugby, Warwickshire, England; died on 23/04/1915 in Skyros, Aegean Sea, was an English poet and a veteran of World War I. He became best known for his sonnets about the war, written in the spring of 1915 – “The Soldier” is sonnet No. V. He died shortly thereafter aboard a French hospital ship from complications of blood poisoning.
There is a wealth of poetry, particularly by British participants in World War I, on various aspects of war; although originally written from a British perspective, much of it can be described as almost universally applicable more than a century later, for instance the works of MacLeish, McCrae or Binyon.
If, for example, one were to replace England in the sonnet above with any other country, the poem’s message would remain unchanged. The feelings and longings, the pain and suffering of all soldiers and their families are no different, nor are the thoughts that provide them comfort.
(Head picture: A small tree with autumn leaves among gravestones
at the British military cemetery Reichswald near Kleve/Germany,
November 2025)
If you wish to support my work on Julius Erasmus, you can do so here. Many thanks!