1. Poets
of the
Great War
Rupert Brooke

2. Rupert Chawner Brooke was born in Rugby on
August 3rd 1887. He went to Cambridge
University and was a good poet.
In 1911 his first book of poetry was published.
In 1915 he was asked to join the Royal Navy
by Winston Churchill, and he accepted.
Brooke sailed to Gallipoli to fight the Turks. He
was pleased about this as he had always
wanted to do battle with the Turks.

3. “I suddenly realised
that the ambition of
my life
has been - since I was
two - to go on a
military
expedition against the
Turks.“
Rupert Brooke, 1915

4. Rupert Brooke’s best known poem is probably The
Soldier. It was written in 1914. The Soldier expresses a
noble, self-sacrificial attitude to war in contrast to the
more realistic poetry of other war poets such as
Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

5. At 4:46pm on the 23rd April 1915, St
George’s Day, Rupert Brooke died of blood
poisoning on a French hospital ship moored
in the bay of the Greek island of Skyros.
“We buried him in the same evening in an olive-grove
where he had sat with us on Tuesday - one of the
loveliest places on this earth, with grey green olives
round him, one weeping above his head…”

6. “Here lies a servant of God, Sub-Lieutenant in the English Navy, who died for the deliverance of
Constantinople from the Turks.”

7. The Soldier
Rupert Brooke

8. 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;

9. 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.

10. 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.