Unfortunately the attitude if not the poetry of Rupert Brooke's poem can
and is being played out by the Bush administration and asserted
constantly.  Of course they probably do not read TWL.


Date sent:              Wed, 27 Nov 2002 08:16:32 -0600
Send reply to:          "T. S. Eliot Discussion forum." <[log in to unmask]>
From:                   Carrol Cox <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:                Re: NYTimes.com Article: From the Front,a Corner of Hell That Is
                Forever Lyrical
To:                     [log in to unmask]

[log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> This article from NYTimes.com
> [clip]
> November 27, 2002
> By ALAN RIDING
> [clip]
> > To this day, every time Britons go to war, the opening
> lines of Rupert Brooke's 1914 poem, "The Soldier," are
> remembered: "If I should die, think only this of me:/That
> there's some corner of a foreign field/That is forever
> England." [clip]

The crucial fact re this poem is its _date_, 1914. It is essentially a
_pre-war_ poem, not a war poem. It belongs in the same category as a
poem
WW 1 buried: The poem that contains the lines "Play up, play up, and play
the game" and "drenched with the blood of a broken square." (Can't
remember title or author.) It is part of the _significance_, if not the
meaning, of TWL that it 'celebrates' a world in which such poems can no
longer be written.

Carrol