COMMENTARY ABOUT BOTH POEMS

The poem “The Soldier” written by Rupert Brooke it’s a reflect of how an individual feels or thinks when offering his life for his country, in this case England. Louise Bennett with her poem “Colonization In Reverse” Talks about how Jamaicans colonized and how English’s didn’t.

Analyzing the poem “The Soldier”, we can say that Rupert Brooke was proud of his country. Even tough he didn’t participate in the war, he knew it was an honorable mission for the English, so he made a poem as a propaganda for young people to help on the upcoming war. “there shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed” (lines 3-4), means that the ground he dies, is better because it has English blood. In contrast to the poem named “Colonization in reverse”, we can say that Louise Bennett is also proud of Jamaica, that she is even implying that they are now superior to England because Jamaicans achieved their independency and because of this they are now freed from England. This is a similarity because both Rupert Brooke and Louise Bennett are proud enough of their country that they even wrote poems about the situation that was undergoing both countries.

Flipping the coin, ‘The soldier’ its structured like the old Shakespearean way of ABAB-CDCD-EFGEFG, it is a 14 line iambic parameter sonnet. This makes this poem rhyme like normally all poems do. In this poem, if you want to understand it by only reading it once, forget about it because you will have to read it more than twice to acknowledge the poem.  ‘Colonization in reverse’  has  11 stanzas with 4 verses each one. Having 4 verses per stanza, makes it have a better understanding of the theme, and this is because reading all the way through the bottom like in the first poem, this one have time spaces in between stanzas.

Talking about the tone in both poems, the tone that it’s used in the sonnet ‘The Soldier’ it is redacted in a non so coherent way to understand it. You would need some research to understand the poem at its very most, “Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.” (This line creates a feeling of tranquillity and a unity with nature) Is an example of how the meaning of the sentence in the poem it’s hidden. In contrast to the second poem, you would really need to be Jamaican to understand it! It is not common English, it uses words such as “doan” or “dem” instead of using “don’t “or “them” it isn’t coherent either because even though it can be translated into English, it doesn’t make any sense sometimes, like the second and third stanza’s, they do not match each other in any aspect. I think this kind of English represent the old Jamaican dialects that used to be spoken there.

If we focus on the images of both stories, in the poem ‘the soldier’ there are different sentences that makes us imagine a perfect England, I quote “Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home” (line 8) and “Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day” (line 12). This quotes are examples of images in the text ‘the soldier’. In the second poem, I quote:

 “What an islan! What a people!
Man an woman, old an young
Jus a pack dem bag an baggage
An turn history upside dung!”

This quote we can deduce that Jamaicans or at least Louise Bennett tries to make us think on the kind of place that everybody interacts with each other, by saying “what an islan! What a people!”. The authors of both stories try to make us see or know only what they think it’s the ideal form of such places.

In the first poem, the author doesn’t tell us just like that what they should do if he dies, or he doesn’t tell us that if he dies anywhere, the ground would be better than anything else because it has his essence. It is hidden in the metaphor and you have to analyze it deeply to know what he ment with such phrases. Same in the second poem, which its only difficult because it has words that aren’t common to us and we don’t know what it means, but once translated you we can understand it.

After analyzing the two poems, we can say that both poems share some similarities like talking about England and a wonderful place. We may conclude that the two authors wanted to highlight the culture of their country, Rupert Brooke highlight England saying that its an honor to die for your country and Louise Bennett kept making Jamaica look superior to others, wanting the best of the best for her country.

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