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The Soldier
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“The Soldier” rhymes ababcdcd efgefg. The meter is iambic pentameter, meaning there are five iambs (an iamb is a two-syllable foot where an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable) per line. There are only four feet where the meter varies. First, the second foot on Line 4 contains two stressed (or accented) syllables in a row: rích • éarth. That’s a spondee, not an iamb. Second, Line 5 contains the foot “shaped, made.” That’s also a spondee. Third, Line 8 begins, “Washed by,” which is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable: Wáshed • by. That’s a trochee, not an iamb. Fourth, the first two syllables of Line 11 are “Gives some,” which is another spondee. Even with these irregularities, the meter is remarkably consistent. “The Soldier” is 70 feet in total and only four of them vary.
The regularity of the meter is suggestive of the poem’s subject. Soldiers are commanded to dress, march, and maneuver in an orderly fashion, thus the meter of “The Soldier” is strict and uniform.
The consistency of the meter is also soothing. After his death, the soldier-speaker writes that he will become “[a] pulse in the eternal mind” (Line 10). The poem also has a regular pulse—its meter. Like the speaker’s claim that he will continue as a pulse, the regularity of the poem’s meter suggests that there is continuity and continuance after death. The smoothness of the meter fits with the soothing content of the poem, which is all about a soldier’s patriotic contributions to his country and consciousness continuing after his death.
Sonnet
An English sonnet is a 14-line poem typically written in iambic pentameter that follows the rhyme-scheme ababcdcdefefgg. As discussed in the Form and Meter section above, “The Soldier” is a 14-line poem written in iambic pentameter that follows the rhyme-scheme ababcdcd efgefg.
The rhyme-scheme of the first eight lines of “The Soldier” is suggestive of an English sonnet. The rhyme-scheme of the last six lines is suggestive of an Italian sonnet, as is the stanza break. Italian poets invented the sonnet form. In an Italian sonnet, the first eight lines always rhyme abbaabba, then the rhyme-scheme of the remaining six lines can vary slightly, but these lines typically rhyme cdecde. English poets, however, had difficulty using the Italian rhyme-scheme because fewer words rhyme in English than Italian. Writing eight lines using only two end-sounds was significantly trickier for an English poet than an Italian one, thus the progenitors of the English sonnet changed the rhyme-scheme to allow in more sounds. In “The Soldier,” Brooke uses the rhyme-pattern of an English sonnet for the first eight lines, then switches to the rhyme-pattern of an Italian sonnet for the last six lines.
This structure preserves the location of the turn, or volta, in an Italian sonnet. An important feature of both the English sonnet and the Italian sonnet is the turn, and in both cases the turn happens when the rhyme-scheme shifts. In an English sonnet, this is between Lines 12 and 13; in an Italian sonnet, it’s between Lines 8 and 9. The rhyme-scheme of “The Soldier” shifts where an Italian sonnet shifts after Line 8.
The turn in a traditional sonnet (be it English or Italian) marks not just a sonic shift but also a rhetorical one. This is what happens in “The Soldier.” While the first eight lines of the poem imagine what will happen to the soldier-speaker’s body after death, the last six lines imagine what will happen to his soul. The stanza break in the middle of “The Soldier” also suggests an Italian sonnet as it happens between Lines 8 and 9.
Early sonnets of both the Italian and English variety were love poems—Petrarch wrote Italian sonnets of love and devotion to Laura, and William Shakespeare wrote English sonnets of love and devotion to a fair boy and a dark lady. After the Renaissance, however, poets quickly began to use the sonnet to treat other subjects, and by the early 20th century (when Brooke wrote “The Soldier”), poets had used the sonnet form to treat almost every subject imaginable.
“The Soldier” is ostensibly about a soldier dying during WWI, but the poem expresses a great deal of love for the soldier’s country, England. Like the meter and rhyme-scheme Brooke uses, this love of country connects the poem to the sonnet form.
Elegy
While most traditional English elegies (including Milton’s “Lycidas”) mourn first, then offer readers consolation second, Brooke skips straight to the consolation. In Brooke’s poem, the soldier-speaker “achieves apotheosis in the ideal of state,” as Jahan Ramazani explains:
Notoriously, Rupert Brooke in “The Soldier” finds compensation for the loss of his life in the consequent expansion of England, literalizing imperialist ideology:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
Brooke wagers his death for England’s continued life (Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning. University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 70).
As well as imitating genre conventions established by Milton, Brooke is also borrowing from the extremely English “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray. Milton established the genre conventions for elegy and Gray added additional formal features to that genre tradition.
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