The Soldier

Rupert Brooke

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.

The sonnet of patriotic consolation, written late in 1914. Brooke died on the way to Gallipoli in April 1915, on a hospital ship in the Aegean, of sepsis from an infected mosquito bite.

Source: Rupert Brooke, 1914 and Other Poems (1915), from The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (1915). Text: Project Gutenberg. Public domain in the US.

Public domain in the United States.