Problem
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) wrote one of the early patriotic poems of World War I (1914-18), a conflict that claimed 8+ million military dead, one third of whom succumbed to disease. Brooke was an established poet before the war and volunteered as soon as hostilities began. He died of blood poisoning aboard ship in the Aegean Sea, en route to the Battle of Gallipoli, having never seen action. Yet he was mourned as a national hero back in England. How does the narrator in "The Soldier" want to be remembered should he die in the war? What is the basis of the patriotic sentiment of the poem?