How does the poem – the soldier by rupert brooke compare with reality?
The Soldier was written in a style that applauds patriotism/heroism – the soldier’s dying a heroic death, although far from his homeland, he says he dies for his country. It’s a pro-war propaganda. It only shows the idealistic scene of dying at war, not the true horror of it. It is admirable, what the soldier feels and at the beginning of the war, that was the sentiment of the nation but it did not remain so for long. Do YOU think this happens in real life? Would YOU be prepared to die in a foreign land for something not really concerning you? Do you think your ‘sins’ will be atoned for by dying at war (‘all evil shed away’)? Is this situation realistic? You might want to compare it to Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, which is an anti-war poem, where the soldier(s) realize that there’s nothing really heroic in a battlefield, their death is actually pointless, futile. In reality, that was what war is. Many didn’t really know or have lost track of the reason they were sent to war in
