On April 23, , Rupert Brooke, a young scholar and poet serving as an officer in the British Royal Navy, dies of blood poisoning on a hospital ship anchored off the Greek island of Skyros, while awaiting deployment in the Allied invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula. Brooke subsequently returned to Britain to await redeployment, where he caught the flu during the training and preparation. While recovering, Brooke wrote what would become the most famous of his war sonnets, including "Peace," "Safety," "The Dead" and "The Soldier.
On April 10, he sailed with his unit to Greece, where they anchored off Skyros. There, Brooke developed a fatal case of blood poisoning from an insect bite; he died on April 23, , aboard a hospital ship, two days before the Allies launched their massive, ill-fated invasion of Gallipoli.
The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable war sonnets which he has left behind, Churchill wrote, will be shared by many thousands of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward in this, the hardest, the cruelest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Brian Boru, the high king of Ireland, is assassinated by a group of retreating Norsemen shortly after his Irish forces defeated them. Brian, a clan prince, seized the throne of the southern Irish state of Dal Cais from its Eoghanacht rulers in He subjugated all of Munster, According to tradition, the great English dramatist and poet William Shakespeare is born in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 23, Brooke himself died while serving in the Royal Navy in A mosquito bite became infected, and he died of sepsis in April of —a solider, a poet, no more.
Nearly 20 million dead or missing on both sides, another 20 million wounded, and a world that would never be the same. We think that's a good way to summarize World War I.
Now, you might be thinking, Rupert Brooke is often classified as a World War I poet, and yet there is no trace of this horror in "The Soldier. In fact, the entire second half of the poem, is about a very peaceful afterlife, an "English heaven. So why should you care about an old war and an older poem? Well, it's a perfect example of the "before photo" of how folks feel before they commit themselves to the violence of war. To cut him some slack, there is no way he could have known what course the war would take, and how horrible it would be.
As a matter of fact, nobody could have foreseen just how bad things would get for everyone. The massive death that machine guns, mustard gas, and disease would inflict on millions of young European soldiers was as far from the general public's consciousness as just about anything could be.
The simple fact was that wars had never been as bad as World War I was to be. And that's kind of the point. Brooke's poem reflects this pre-war perspective and is an important counterpoint to much World War I poetry.
The poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, among others, often emphasize the senselessness of the Great War and the tragic deaths many young soldiers suffered. As such, it gives us some great insight into how people can romanticize war when they haven't yet experienced it. The destruction of this pre-war idealism was almost as significant for Europe as the destruction of so many young lives.
Recalling Brooke's death, Browne had written:. At four o'clock he became weaker, and at 4. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme. That sonnet was published in the Times the next day to great acclaim - as, shortly after, was Winston Churchill's obituary of Brooke.
The Soldier. Photo: Hulton Archive.
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