Dead Bodies in WWI War Poetry: Owen, Hardy, Rosenberg & Brooke

Introduction: War Poetry and the Dead Soldier

War is a brutal reality on the face of history. Thousands of lives have been lost in the name of battle, and millions of people have been affected by it. The poet is a particularly sensitive member of society who feels the brutality of war more acutely than the average individual. During World War I, the world endured tremendous devastation, during which millions of lives were shaken. In this era, many poets emerged in response to the suffering society experienced. Some of the most notable among them are Wilfred Owen, Thomas Hardy, Isaac Rosenberg, and Rupert Brooke. These poets differed greatly in personality and writing style; however, one element was strikingly common: they each used the soldier's dead body as a symbol of war's ultimate consequence. Although the way each poet employed this symbol was distinctly his own, the similarity cannot go unnoticed (Means, 1994).

Wilfred Owen was a brave soldier who fought on behalf of Britain in the war trenches of World War I. Before enlisting, he had written several poems, of which "Dulce et Decorum Est" is considered a masterpiece. Owen was born into a comfortable family that was subjected to bankruptcy when he was two years old. This misfortune left his family in a pessimistic state of mind from which they never fully recovered, and it left a lasting mark on Owen's personality, shaping him into a serious yet perceptive young man (Soudah, 1988).

Wrestling with his internal struggles, Owen decided to join the army after visiting several hospitals where wounded war soldiers were being treated (Kirreh, 1986). After enlisting, he confronted the harsh reality that war is brutal and never truly ends — it stays inside those who fought it, forever. While fighting in Beaumont Hamel, on the Somme, he wrote letters home that described the war experience more vividly than many historical accounts.

Wilfred Owen and 'Dulce et Decorum Est'

After being injured in an explosion and returning to England, where he was diagnosed with shell shock, Owen wrote "Dulce et Decorum Est." The poem succeeded in making the general public aware of what life in the trenches was truly like — a reality the British government intended to conceal from the civilian population. The poem depicts the horrendous conditions soldiers faced in World War I and is written in a manner that leaves grotesque images in the reader's mind (Moore, 1919).

Owen structured the poem so that each stanza serves a distinct purpose. The poem centers on the sickening experience of watching a man slowly approached by death after a gas attack, with the war raging around him. In the first stanza, Owen describes the environment surrounding the dying soldiers. He uses powerful words such as "trudge," "marches asleep," "drunk with fatigue," and "old beggars under sacks" to convey that soldiers no longer possessed the zest, health, or energy to fight, and were slowly dying from within — their souls hollowed out by hopelessness, already dead inside with no sign of life.

After establishing the terrible conditions soldiers endured, Owen moves on to describe the fear crawling inside the speaker's mind. He uses the word "ecstasy" to capture the frenzied mental state of a soldier whose life is in immediate danger, a state that ultimately leads to a horrible death. The exhaustive, weary experience of the soldier is suddenly overturned when Owen deploys "ecstasy" as an expression of adrenaline and panic. The word stresses the surge of hormones that soldiers experienced when their lives were threatened and creates a deliberately confused state in the reader. The lines "Flound'ring like a man in fire or lime" and "As under a green sea, I saw him drowning" are particularly effective in explaining how mustard gas overwhelmed the soldiers, creating havoc in their lungs and slowly killing every living cell in their bodies — much like water slowly penetrating and suffocating a drowning man.

The last stanza is the most powerful part of Owen's poem. He employs lines such as "blood-shod" coming from "froth-corrupted lungs" and forces the reader to "watch the white eyes writhing in his face":

"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;"

These lines illustrate his experience of following a wagon carrying the body of a soldier who died from a gas attack in the trench, blood pouring from his poisoned lungs and his eyes wide open in fear and horror. Owen ultimately argues that war stories may be told as heroic, but the experiences themselves were nothing short of horrifying.

While describing the slow death of a soldier, Owen also attends to the trenches themselves — unsafe grounds where soldiers were exposed to open hazards, enemy attacks, and natural calamities alike. It is his use of similes and metaphors that leaves an indelible impact on readers.

Rupert Brooke was an inspirational poet who was greatly influenced by war, yet never had the chance to take part in it himself (Hickman, 1994). He wrote the poem "The Soldier" in 1914, speaking in the first person as a soldier who fought in World War I. Compared to writers such as Owen and Hardy, Brooke depicted a far more positive image of war. He argued that fighting for a just cause is a noble deed and that there is no greater honor than dying for one's country. "The Soldier" stands as his most compelling articulation of this belief.

In this poem, Brooke embodies the persona of an Englishman representing his nation. Brooke's soldier is young, full of zest and patriotism, and anticipates meeting — and even defeating — death in war. When this young soldier dies, he asks his fellow soldiers, his family, and his country not to mourn or feel sorrow for him; they should instead feel proud, for the land where his body lies has now become a part of England, and he has won his country a piece of foreign soil.

"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England."

Brooke goes on to explain that as his body decays into the soil, the earth will become richer and more fertile, for it now contains part of an English body. England gave birth to this soldier, raised him, nurtured him, loved him, offered him clean air to breathe and beautiful lands to walk through, and blessed him with gifts such as clean water and sunlight. Despite all the hardships of war, his heart holds no wickedness, but an eternal peace bestowed upon him by God as a reward for his noble deeds and love of his glorious country. The English people remaining in the homeland will enjoy the openness and peace that his death has granted them.

Rupert Brooke and 'The Soldier'

"In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
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."

Through this poem, Brooke used death to instill hope in the minds of the English people during World War I. He avoided heavy metaphors and similes to ensure that the poem could be understood by all. The language is deliberately simple, centering on patriotism. Brooke included no horrifying or tragic war stories; instead, he explained that dying for one's country and serving one's people is the kind of death one should aspire to.

He described his country as a kind of heaven: "In hearts at peace, under an English heaven." He further presented England as a loving, caring mother who bears and nurtures her child with love and affection ("A dust whom England bore"). England is portrayed as a paradise on Earth, a safe place to which a soldier can look forward to returning after the war. Once the soldier dies, his soul enters that heaven — England itself — and is at peace, having reached his paradise.

Brooke maintained a simple and peaceful tone throughout "The Soldier," emphasizing that war is just and worth fighting because it may bring eternal peace. Unlike many other war writers, he avoided the gruesome realities of battle — perhaps because he was deeply patriotic, or perhaps because he never encountered war firsthand. Gentle images such as "flowers to love" and the glorious picture of the English countryside — including "rivers" and "suns of home" — reinforce the poem's peaceful tone. The sestet offers an optimistic and idyllic atmosphere through phrases such as "dreams happy as her day," "laughter," and "an English heaven." The final line captures the poem's gentleness most completely with the phrase "and gentleness, in hearts at peace."

By contrast, Thomas Hardy did not depict war as pleasingly as Brooke. In his poem "Drummer Hodge," Hardy narrates the story of a young Englishman who died during the Boer War in South Africa (Johnston, 1964). Hardy wrote this poem after the completion of the World Wars. Like Brooke, he never participated in combat; in fact, he was 72 years old when he wrote the poem. What he wrote, therefore, was drawn from imagination and personal perception of war rather than lived experience.

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, the son of a country man. He appeared to lead a normal and successful life on the surface, yet there was a "pattern of storm beneath the tranquility." During the three decades of his creative output, public acclaim, and critical praise, his private life was overshadowed by what appeared to be his first wife's deteriorating mental health. She suffered from delusions, one of which was that she had married beneath herself. She also believed that she had written Hardy's work and that he had stolen it for publication under his own name. She insulted him publicly, taking greater pride in being the niece of an archdeacon than in being the wife of England's greatest living writer. She even attempted to stop the publication of Jude the Obscure, considering it immoral. She died unexpectedly in 1912, and although Hardy had been with her shortly before, she never regained consciousness after a dispute between them. His remorse and grief released some of the most moving love poems of his — or any — century. Home life grew much calmer and more ordered when he married Florence Ellen Dugdale in 1914. All around him, people lived in extreme poverty because of the poor law system, and many skilled men were unemployed. Hardy was not only a poet but also a novelist, and he believed the purpose of fiction was "to give pleasure by gratifying the love of the uncommon human experience." It is clear that Hardy knew lost love and experienced the hardships of his surrounding world.

Drummer Hodge was a young soldier who died in a war whose cause he never understood. Worse still, after his death, his body was shown no respect — it was mutilated and thrown into a ditch alongside other dead bodies. His grave was given no headstone, so no one could identify where he was buried. The only landmark indicating the position of his grave is the "kopje crest / That breaks the veldt around." Hodge received a distinctly foreign burial, and Hardy used terms such as "kopje" and "veldt" to underscore the strangeness of his resting place and the alien stars that rise nightly above his grave.

Hodge was a young and naïve soldier who had no business being on that battlefield. Having fought the battle and served his country, his service should have been acknowledged. Although Hodge was ignorant of the cause for which he fought, he will forever remain part of the South African veldt. His body, returning to the soil, will eventually nourish some tree in South Africa. The irony of this outcome is conveyed through terms like "southern trees" and "strange stars."

Furthermore, the indignity of being buried in a strange land adds a painful dimension to the poem. For Brooke, dying on foreign soil would have been something to be proud of — an act that earns a place in heaven. Hardy, however, emphasizes the distress and humiliation of having one's wartime contribution go entirely unnoticed. Hodge clearly inhabits the darker, more sobering tradition of war poetry, one that is full of horrors.

Conclusion: The Dead Body as Symbol of War

War is surely gruesome, and poets are the members of society most affected by it, as they feel the pain of their communities rather closely. Wilfred Owen, Thomas Hardy, Isaac Rosenberg, and Rupert Brooke are among those writers whose work regarding World War I and the Boer War cannot be neglected. All four used the soldier's dead body as a symbol of war's ultimate consequence; however, the way each poet expressed it carried its own individualized meaning. Owen's dead soldier is a grotesque testament to the lies of glory; Brooke's is a noble offering that enriches foreign soil; Hardy's is a forgotten, unacknowledged youth buried in a strange land; and Rosenberg's is a bewildering waste whose silent departure raises unanswerable questions about the value of human life.