| The Soldier | ||||||||
| 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, | 5 | |||||||
| 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 | 10 | |||||||
| 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 — This poem, number V (and the last) of Brooke’s war sonnets, was published along with number IV, “The Dead,” in The Times Literary Supplement in March of 1915, and then read aloud at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on Easter Sunday, 4 April. Brooke died nineteen days later, on 23 April, from an infection caused by a mosquito bite onboard a French hospital ship at anchor off the island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea. Had he lived, he would have been part of the landings at Gallipoli, one of the great debacles of the war on the Allied side. This poem quickly became one of the most popular of the war and was often read at soldiers’ funerals. |
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