poem name a Nationa's strength 1. Answer the following questions briefly.
a. The poem broadly deals with the following ideas. Against each idea, write
the number of the stanza or stanzas that relate to it.
i. What is the source of a nation's strength?
.
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Answer:
Explanation:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Stanza explanation
“The Soldier” explores the bond between a patriotic British soldier and his homeland. 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—and accordingly is willing to sacrifice his life for the greater good of his nation. This is, then, a deeply patriotic poem, implicitly arguing that nations have their own specific character and values—and that England’s are especially worthy of praise.
Though most people might fear death—particularly of the violent kind that war can bring—the speaker of “The Soldier” is prepared to die because he believes hew 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” (notably “foreign” because it won’t be in England)—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. Accordingly, dying somewhere “foreign” leaves a small part of the home nation in that foreign land. Nationhood, then, is portrayed as something that is inseparable from a person’s identity—even when they die.
Indeed, the speaker feels he owes his identity itself primarily to his country. It was the personified England that “bore” and “shaped” him, nourished him with sun (ironic, given the often gloomy weather!) and air, and cleansed him with “water.” Much of the sonnet’s octave—the eight-line stanza—is devoted to creating a sense of England as a pastoral, idyllic, and even Eden-like place. The poem’s imagery of rivers, flowers, earth, air, and sun, is part of an attempt to transform nationhood from a human concept to something more fundamental and natural (all the while tied to England specifically), as though the land is infused with the character of its people and vice versa.
In fact, this nationhood is so deeply embedded in who people are—or so the poem argues—that it extends beyond the earthly realm. Even the heaven that the speaker hopes to go to is specifically an “English heaven.” In part, that’s because the speaker’s idea of heaven is a projection of how he sees England—apart from being a kind of natural and nurturing mother, England is already a kind of heaven. Indeed, the poem presents England and heaven as almost interchangeable—as described above, everything about England is supposedly pure and nourishing. The speaker’s consciousness, after he dies, will return to an “eternal mind” which will still be forever linked to the place that created it.
There is nothing in the poem, then, of the horrors of war. Indeed, there is very little of the realities of war at all. This perhaps explains why the poem has inspired strong reactions ever since its publication. It was immensely popular when it was published in 1914, but this was before the true horrors of the First World War had been fully revealed, a time when the war was still tinged with an air of excitement, anticipation, and, of course, patriotism. In the decades that followed, some critics saw Brooke’s poetry as woefully naïve and sentimental. Either way, the poem is a powerful expression of patriotic desire and belief in the bond between people and their homeland