Rupert Brooke’s Poetic Deaths

In his most famous sonnet, “The Soldier,” which appeared in December 1914, Rupert Brooke’s poetic voice declares: “if I should die think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.” By April 1915, Brooke was dead. That Winston Churchill promptly declared that these lines expressed the “sorrow of youth about to die” immediately ensured that Brooke would become a patriotic icon of a poetic genius who had anticipated his own doom on the way to Gallipoli. Although recent criticism has sought to reveal the ways in which Brooke's sonnet belonged to a carefully crafted “celebrity aesthetic,” the present discussion situates “The Soldier” in Brooke’s longstanding poetics of death, which began during his schooldays when he immersed himself in decadent poetry. This article shows that in many of his poems Brooke struggles with his deepening fears--one mediated through several sources, such as Nietzsche, which he encountered before World War I--about the inescapable nature of decay. His poems about death venture into imaginative realms that seek to animate the afterlife, sometimes in comic forms, though with the enduring recognition that nothing can ultimately remain alive--in a phrase he gleaned from Donne--in the yearned-for “aeterna corpora” of art.