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[neukpuppy.livejournal.com]

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever 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.

The Soldier
Rupert Brooke

Comments

[tears-of-nienna.livejournal.com]

Brooke never quite got into the bitter Sassoon/Owen* mode that most WWI poetry seems to adopt. Sassoon, admittedly, started out very bombastic and nationalistic, but pretty early on his poems changed in tone. Brooke...never really seemed to lose that nationalistic fervor. His poems always make me think of "Flanders Fields," and then I get upset and have to go read "Dulce et Decorum Est."


*And I do mean that with the slash between them. They are my somewhat-historical OTP.