“And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping” Brooke claims that life for the young was extremely dull and unfulfilling. War is seen as a welcomed awaking from their dull existence and therefore a positive and welcomed act. Brooke manages with this sentence to illustrate popular feelings of the time, the war was only meant to ‘last until Christmas’ and was therefore being treated as something to ‘waken’ the youth and show patriotism so many people for this reason would see the announcement of war as something to be celebrated.
“To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,” Brooke describes war as a new and exciting adventure, a chance to cleanse them almost creating a new life for themselves. He describes war in a positive light, showing it as an opportunity for a better life away from the ‘weary’ country they are presently used to.
“Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, and half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, and all the emptiness of love!” Brookes is very negative about peacetime, which is a sharp contrast to his description of his celebration for war “now, God be thanked”. He believes that peacetime is very
uninteresting and very for war. The country had been at peace for fifty years and many men Brookes age were itching to fight in a great battle. The end of the octave ("And all the little emptiness of love!") is the climax of the sonnet. But with the first line of the sestet, Brooke comes back to his theme of absolution and reinforces the dual meaning of the poem: Oh, we who have known shame, we have found release there”. "There" is both the war and Brooke's own state simplicity of what he sees is a soldier's life and fate whether a soldier in war or a soldier of life.
Rupert Brooke is very persuasive and encourages others to participate in war. “And the worst friend and enemy is but Death”, he believes that death is not even very important in comparison to fighting for ones country. Brooke was a pre- war poet, expressing the pre-war sentiment of cleansing and wrote poetry in the early days of the war that celebrated this image of the "Happy Warrior." In the early days of the war Brookes would have been able to persuade many people with this poem that war should in fact be celebrated as death was honourable and that was the ‘worst friend’ they would experience.
