The Soldier

An elegy is a poem of mourning written on the occasion of a death. Traditional English elegies tended to focus on a single, specific death. In “The Soldier,” the speaker imagines his own death during WWI, making the poem not just an elegy but a self-elegy.

More than most other types of poems, elegies imitate, reference, and relate to other elegies. As a result, to understand the literary context of Brooke’s poem, it is helpful to understand a little bit about the English elegiac tradition.

In what is widely considered the most important and influential English elegy, John Milton called back to a much earlier Greek tradition, where shepherds sat around in the countryside and lamented the death of one of their shepherd-friends but eventually found comfort and consolation for their loss (Milton, John. “Lycidas.” Poetry Foundation). Milton’s “Lycidas” established the pastoral tradition in English elegy, and Brooke’s poem also employs a pastoral setting.

Additionally, Milton and Brooke wrote their respective elegies at very similar times in their lives. Milton wrote “Lycidas” for Edward King, a classmate of his at Cambridge who drowned after the ship that was transporting him to Ireland sank. King was still a young man when he died, and Milton was also relatively young when he wrote “Lycidas.” Like Milton, Brooke also went to Cambridge; and like Milton, Brooke wrote “The Soldier” as a young man contemplating the death of a young man (in Brooke’s case, himself).

Milton’s “Lycidas” initiated a genre tradition—in other words, certain content elements and a certain emotional progression that a reader might expect to see in an English elegy. The most important part of this emotional progression is consolation. The goal of a traditional elegy is to offer consolation, and this consolation is typically achieved through an “apotheosis of the dead”; in other words, an image of the dead person living on above the reader—in heaven, as a star in the sky, or as a part of nature. Toward the end of Milton’s “Lycidas,” for example, the dead man is seen in heaven, entertained by saints.

While Milton wrote “Lycidas” in unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, Gray wrote “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” in four-line stanzas, also known as quatrains, that rhyme abab. Many traditional English elegies written after Gray, including “The Soldier,” tend to imitate Milton’s content and Gray’s form.

Elegies written after Gray’s poem tend to have interlocking rhyme-schemes, and they sometimes even employ more elaborate rhymes than Gray did. “The Soldier” is a good example of this because the first stanza rhymes ababcdcd, imitating Gray’s rhyme pattern, but the second stanza rhymes efgefg. That’s a more complicated rhyme-scheme than the one Gray used. (For more on the poem’s form, see the “Literary Devices” section.)

Finally, at the end of Gray’s elegy, the speaker offers consolation for his own death, making Gray’s poem a self-elegy, a move which Brooke imitates.