Language and style

Looking at elements of language and style will help you analyse the poem “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke at a deeper level and understand it better.

Playing with the language

The poet plays very little with language in this poem, mainly through metaphors and personification. For instance, he refers to his prospective dead self as “a dust” (l. 5), a “body of England’s” (l. 7) or “a pulse” (l. 10). Then, he talks of England as if the country were a woman who is sometimes like a mother and other times like a lover:

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
     Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, (ll. 5-6)​
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
     And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, (ll. 12-13)

Tense of the verbs

The poet mixes present tense with conditionals, future tense and past tense, making the text very dynamic regarding verbs. The conditional is used to form a hypothesis, while future tense shows what is to happen in case the hypothesis becomes a fact: “If I should die” (l. 1) – “There shall be” (l. 3).

Present tense is used when the soldier presents permanent situations/things, such as death or...

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