Poets

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Poets of the Great War Rupert Brooke
By Ms Stubbs Downloaded from
www.SchoolHistory.co.uk
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Rupert Chawner Brooke was born in Rugby on August
3rd 1887. He went to Cambridge University and was
a good poet.In 1911 his first book of poetry
was published.In 1915 he was asked to join the
Royal Navy by Winston Churchill, and he
accepted.Brooke sailed to Gallipoli to fight
the Turks. He was pleased about this as he had
always wanted to do battle with the Turks.
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I suddenly realised that the ambition of my life
has been - since I was two - to go on a military
expedition against the Turks. Rupert Brooke,
1915
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Rupert Brookes best known poem is probably The
Soldier. It was written in 1914. The Soldier
expresses a noble, self-sacrificial attitude to
war in contrast to the more realistic poetry of
poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

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THE SOLDIER If I should die, think only this of
meThat there's some corner of a foreign
fieldThat is for ever England. There shall beIn
that rich earth a richer dust concealedA 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.
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And think, this heart, all evil shed away,A
pulse in the eternal mind, no lessGives
somewhere back the thoughts by England
givenHer sights and sounds dreams happy as her
dayAnd laughter, learnt of friends and
gentleness,In hearts at peace, under an English
heaven.
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At 446pm on the 23rd April 1915, St Georges
Day, Rupert Brooke died of blood poisoning on a
French hospital ship moored in the bay of the
Greek island of Skyros. 
We buried him in the same evening in an
olive-grove where he had sat with us on Tuesday -
one of the loveliest places on this earth, with
grey green olives round him, one weeping above
his head
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Here lies a servant of God, Sub-Lieutenant in
the English Navy, who died for the deliverance of
Constantinople from the Turks.