Intro and Big Idea

Introduction:

In heaven one will find those who died proudly and those who died in hatred. The poem by Rupert Brooke The Soldier and the poem Reconciliation by Siegfried Sassoon both cope with the situation of dying for one’s own country and the nationalistic feeling towards war. While both poems speak of war in different ways and through the use of different devices, the two lyric poems have some similarities. The biggest difference is the fact that The Soldier was written before the war and is an Italian sonnet and Reconciliation was written after the war and is an epigram. The main idea portrayed in The Soldier speaks of the love towards own country and that it is a positive thing if one dies for their own country. Reconciliation speaks of the horrors of the war, and that it is foolish to think that war is something positive and that fighting is doing a good deed. Therefore, the two poems differ in their perspective but have the same content, since both talk about nationalism and the love or hate to fight for ones country. These main ideas are portrayed and displayed in the pieces through mainly imagery, both sensory and figurative, as well as tone, rhetoric, persona, structure and language. Although one may be more present in one of the poems than in the other, both use imagery as their main device to emphasize their view on going to war and the good and bad things about what happened or what is going to happen.


General Big Idea: The big idea that these two poems both share in common is the juxtaposition about being proud to fight for ones country and the loss that happens during a war.