Scarica The war poets, analisi contesto storico e contenuti e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE WAR POETS Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) was the son of a schoolmaster at Rugby. Brooke was considered extraordinarily handsome as well as clever and he became darling of The Bloomsbury Group, the literary circle that formed around Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, and Virginia Woolf. After studying at Cambridge University he settled in the nearby village of Granchester. Brooke suffered a nervous breakdown in 1913 and travelled first to the United States and then on to Tahiti in order to recuperate. He volunteered for the Royal Navy in 1914. Early in 1915 he sailed for the Dardanelles, where the British intended a landing to advance on Constantinople, but died during the passage from a mosquito bite on the lip. He was buried in an olive grove on Skyros. One of the most anthologised poems in the language is Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier': Romantic, dreamy, patriotic: even the air has nationality. It celebrates memorial resurrection and the suspension of time. Brooke was a Greek scholar at Cambridge and the central thought turns on the idea of cosmic memory (mnemosyne) in which he will be 'a pulse in the eternal mind' reverberating still to an English tempo. This poem may be classed among the literature of martyrology, though it's not a religious poem. It plays on the poetic turn of mind that dreams of being taken up in rapture for the sake of the cause or the faith - this earth, this realm, this England invested with divinity, half in love with easeful death. Brooke is claiming that all shall be remembered, effortlessly. And, it is also the tranquillisation of bad memory. Brooke never saw war. When he died at the age of 28 Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, wrote an obituary in The Times: Rupert Brooke is dead. A telegram from the Admiral at Lemnos tells us that this life has closed at the moment when it seemed to have reached its springtime. A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other more able to express their thoughts of self- surrender, and with a power to carry comfort to those who watch them so intently from afar. The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger. [26 April 1915] R. BROOKE THE SOLDIER Commentary and Analysis “The soldier” belongs to the sonnet sequence “1914”, written during the first phase of the war. It expresses what generally Englishmen felt in the autumn 1914, a sense of patriotism against the enemy and in defence of the country, and the idealization of those who died in battle. It presents a vague generalization of the “war, self-sacrifice, glory” equation, which so deeply affected the young people of those first years. The form itself (a smooth and sweet classical Petrarchan sonnet with a regular rhyme pattern) reflects an abstract view of the war, with no hint at actual horrors or at death, except for the death of the poet himself who, in his romantic idealization, pretends that earth of the “foreign field” where he lies will be “for ever England”. Brooke observes the sonnet form (14 lines of iambic pentameter, divided into an octave and a sestet). The octave is rhymed after the Shakespearean/Elisabethan rhyme scheme (ab ab cd cd), the sestet follows the Petrarchan/Italian rhyme scheme (efg efg). Both the octave and the sestet make the reader imagine the blissful state of the fallen soldier. “The Soldier” is the culmination of Brooke’s sonnet sequence “1914”. In “The Soldier” the poet combines the idea of spiritual cleansing, of inviolable memories of the dead, of hero’s immortal legacy. The poet also invokes the idea of resurrection (“And think, this heart, all evil shed away / A pulse in the eternal mind”).
