Brooke’s belief that God is on England’s side is proven by the quote: ‘blest by the suns of home’. The choice of religious words/phrases shows his strong belief in God: for example, ‘under an English heaven’. This quote emphasises that God is on England’s side and God will take those who fight for England to heaven. Moreover, England itself is described in heavenly terms. So death would just be a transition from one ‘heaven’ to another. His death for England gives him the opportunity to return the favour of being born and nurtured by his beloved country. This again shows not just the strength of his love for England, but also his belief in God. For Brooke, it is an honour to die for one’s country. And whether he expected it or not, Brooke realized his ambition. Ironically, he was not buried in a ‘foreign field’, but died at sea; on his way to the Eastern Front in Turkey.
The poem is written in formal language, and the balanced phrasing gives it a confident tone. The language Brooke uses is simple and easy to understand. It would have been read and appreciated by a far larger readership than reads poetry today. Brooke, with his handsome looks, was the equivalent to a pop idol today. And his early death only added to his and his poem’s mystique.
Brooke’s is a romantic view of war, which the sonnet form is ideally suited. Stretching back to Shakespeare, they are especially associated with love poetry; which in a sense ‘The Soldier’ is. For Brooke speaks of beauty and love – not of a woman – but of his beloved country. As with a love poem, all harshness is toned down. So instead of writing of the ‘battlefield’, Brooke softens it by means of alliteration to ‘foreign field’. He also uses alliteration to exaggerate the beauty of his country: ‘Her sights, her sounds’, conveniently forgetting her slums and industrial landscapes in his efforts to glorify England.
Owen, in contrast, had no such illusions about either his country or the war. When Owen penned ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ in 1917, he had witnessed too much death to write about it in the painless terms of Brooke. Like Brooke, Owen uses alliteration; but unlike Brooke, Owen uses it to show the reality of war, not to mask its horror: ‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks / knock-kneed ……’ This image of soldiers is so far from the stereotype of the heroic, upright soldier, it is hard to believe. But worse is to follow: ‘coughing like hags’. Owen paints a picture more like the three witches from Macbeth than young men in the prime of life. But this is exactly Owen’s point: to show what terrible transformations the horror of war can enact.
Owen’s use of these similes shows the reality of War - Soldiers stripped not just of their battle-dress, but even their humanity. The loss of their boots, causing them to limp ‘blood-shod’, sounds more like the description of a lame animal than a human being.
But the slow procession back to their ‘distant rest’ is suddenly transformed by ‘gas shells dropping behind’. The urgency of the situation is shown by the poet’s use of short sentences and exclamation marks: ‘Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!’ but one of them is too exhausted or wounded to fit ‘The clumsy helmet just in time’ and suffers a horrific death, which is described in detail by Owen:
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime -
In this second stanza, the poet changes tenses from the past to the present continuous. The ‘-ing’ form of the verb allows the reader to imagine being there, as if it is happening now. Just as Owen probably witnessed the scene himself: ‘As under a green sea, I saw him drowning’. The third stanza is shortened to just two lines; to emphasise just how horrific and unimaginable the young soldier’s death must have been:
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
In the long final stanza, Owen once again changes tense and also tone. He invites the reader to imagine what it would be like to witness the soldier’s end and what effect it might have:
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
Owen uses powerful visual language and also sound imagery, so that the reader can both see and hear the last pitiful moments of the young soldier’s life. By his use of fricatives (harsh ‘c’ and ‘g’ sounds), we imagine him coughing his guts up due to the effect of the mustard gas:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Owen’s choice of the word ‘cancer’, gives an indication of how he viewed war: as an incurable disease, a plague on mankind. This would also tie in with the poet’s use of the word ‘lime’ in the second stanza. This is a reference to ‘quicklime’, used in the great plague to quicken the decomposition of diseased corpses. Perhaps also Owen is being critical of British government who tried to conceal the real death rate in the Great War.
As well as addressing his audience, the final stanza is also a direct appeal to Jessie Pope; a famous ‘armchair patriot’, who believed that war was all to do with glory and honour. After reading ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, most people would surely change their minds, and like Owen realise that such a view of war is outdated and just propaganda:
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.
It is as if Owen’s poem is a reply to ‘The Solider’. It is likely that Owen would have been familiar with the poetry of Brooke and indeed Owen’s earlier poetry showed a similar patriotic tone. But the harsh reality of war quickly changed his views and gave us some of the best anti-war poetry ever written.
Looking back over time, we can easily be critical of Brooke’s rather naïve view of war. But to be fair, he could not know what the next three years of war would bring and was only reflecting the patriotic mood of the early months of war. His view is much influenced by the Victorian poets, such as Tennyson, whose ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ saw war as romantic and glorious with valiant cavalrymen charging the enemy on horses. But the First World War was to change all that. This was a twentieth century war with aeroplanes, machine-guns, tanks and gas, which Owen witnessed at first-hand and through his pen, changed not only war poetry, but how future generations have thought about war and the horrors it brings:
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face.
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin.