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What Is The Theme Of The Poem The Soldier

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In 1599, William Shakespeare wrote a play called “Henry V”. Within the play, many speeches would be explored. Also, I would be using a selection of war poems to compare and explore the ways that war is presented in a positive and negative way. “The Soldier” was written by Rupert Brooke in 1914 in a traditional sonnet form. The key themes of this poem are love and death which is the two most powerful things that recall the feeling of readers. Death, as he is a soldier going into World War One, and love in the sense of loving his country. Brooke’s poem “The Soldier” is often compared with Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”, written in 1917, just before the end of the war. “Dulce et Decorum Est” was not patriotic and some people believed that …show more content…

There is nothing difficult about the word choice or its sentence structures. “I knew a simple soldier boy” could almost be the opening sentence for a children book: it is cheerful, pleasant, and appealing. The use of the word “boy”, rather than using “soldier”, helps to make the youth sound particularly young and vulnerable. However, in line 2 where the writer uses oxymoron of “empty joy”. His joy is “empty” in the sense of that it arises from no particular provocation. He also sleeps soundly “through the lonesome dark”. This could mean that he is undisturbed by worries, nightmares, or fears of any kind. The last line in the first stanza, “And whistled early with the lark” creates an image of the boy who wakes up bright and early, and was happy to be awake and living. However, in the trenches, men were not happy to be awake and to them, living might be mean a pain. Also, “lark” is a spring bird, it seems to represent youthfulness. Soon after this stanza, the image of a happy boy is destroyed by the dark, and we begin to feel the depression of the boy. This present the war as a thief and steal youth from every young boy that joined the …show more content…

Sassoon uses the pathetic fallacy of “winter” to represent the boy’s personality as dark, dull and gloomy. It could point out that as the season has changed, so has he. “Cowed” tells us that he is intimidated and scared of war “Glum” sums up his emotion; he is depressed. This stanza ends with “No one spoke of him again”. This line shows us how many soldiers who fought and died in the trenches were forgotten. It could also show that all the suffering were forgotten too; as death was such a common event in the trenches. The juxtaposition of the first two stanza helps Sassoon to make the reader feel the reality of war, and the image of a boy driven to suicide due to war. This supports the idea of not patriotic in “Dulce et Decorum

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