Introduction

In the 1960s, when I was your age, a man used to come round door-to-door selling brushes.  It was impossible to understand what he said.  He just opened an old brown suitcase and pointed.  I hated meeting him.  Every one of his limbs twitched violently; no part of his body was ever still.  Day and night, he shook all over. 

He had shell-shock.  His nerves had been shattered in the First World War, and he had lived in that condition for fifty years.  We always bought something from him, because we felt sorry for him.  He had not died in the War, but he had given his life for his country.

Both the poems on these pages look at the idea of giving your life for your country .     

After you have studied this webpage, answer the question sheet by clicking on the 'Time to Work' icon at the top of the page.

Interrogating the poems:

1  In what ways are the two poems different?

2  What do the authors feel about:
•  England,
•  the War
•  death? 

3  Which poem, do you think, was written first?

1   The Soldier

This poem, written by Rupert Brooke, shares his thoughts about how he feels about the possibility of dying fighting for his country in the Great War.
The poem is one of a series of five 'War Sonnets'.

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,
   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.

2   Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime –
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.