Scarica Rupert Brooke the soldier e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! The soldier by Rupert Brooke BIOGRAPHY Rupert Brooke spent his privileged childhood in the surroundings of the prestigious Rugby Public School where his father was a housemaster. In 1906 he went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied classics and English literature, acted in classical theatre productions and became president of the socialist Fabian Society. His intelligence, athletic build and Apollonian features (W.B. Yeats described him as ‘the handsomest man in Britain’) made him a popular student with both sexes and his social circle included Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Set and many other young literary and political figures. In 1911, attempting to escape the busy academic and social lifestyle on campus, Brooke moved just outside Cambridge to the idyllic English countryside village of Grantchester where he prepared his thesis and completed his first collection of poetry, Poems, published the same year. It was also at this time that Brooke suffered an emotional breakdown resulting from relationship difficulties with three women. He became engaged to Noel Olivier but it seems that he was unable to commit himself to her because of his affections for a Cambridge friend, Ka Cox. He also had an affair with the actress Cathleen Nesbitt and he suffered from insecurity about his sexuality. In a confused and restless state he travelled around England and Germany, finally recovering in Cannes. In 1912 he returned to Cambridge when he was awarded a fellowship. In 1913 Brooke set off for a tour of the US writing articles for the Westminster Gazette. He then travelled in the South Seas and stopped off in Tahiti where he fell in love with a native girl, possibly fathering her child. He returned to England in July 1914 and, when war broke out, he joined the Navy, seeing action at the defence of Antwerp in October, where he saw, at first hand, the damage and destruction of warfare. While waiting redeployment and recovering from a bout of ‘flu, Brooke wrote five poems, known as the war sonnets, 1914: Peace, Safety, The Dead (2 versions) and The Soldier, which established him nationally as a poet on their publication. On 27th February 1915, Brooke’s battalion set sail for the Dardanelles. In March, the ship landed in Egypt where Brooke visited the Pyramids and became ill with dysentery and sunstroke but refused an offer to leave the unit and recover. The ship, now heading for Gallipoli, anchored off the coast of the Greek island of Skyros where Brooke, still weak from his previous illness, was now suffering from an infected insect bite, which led to blood poisoning. He died on 23rd April 1915 on board a hospital ship. The soldier INTRODUCTION It is a Petrarchan sonnet, so it has octet and sonnet; but also it is a Shakespearean sonnet because of the theme. It is full of alliteration, consonance and assonance and recreates an ideal perfect rural England. STANZAS It is a deeply patriotic and idealistic poem that expresses a soldier's love for his homeland, in this case England, which is portrayed as a kind of nurturing paradise. Indeed, such is the soldier's bond with England that he feels his country to be both the origin of his existence and the place to which his consciousness will return when he dies. Through this soldier's passionate discussion of his relationship to England, the poem implies that people are formed by their home environment and culture, and that their country is something worth defending with their life. Indeed, the soldier sees himself as owing his own identity and happiness to England. 1 STANZA "The Soldier" is prepared to die because he believes he would be doing it for his beloved homeland. The speaker thus doesn't want people to grieve his death. He sees that potential death in some "foreign field" as a way of making a small piece of the world "for ever England. That's because he sees himself as an embodiment of his nation. Nationhood, then, is portrayed as something that is inseparable from a person's identity--even when they die. The speaker feels he owes his identity itself primarily to his country.
