WWI was unprecedented in its length and horrific character as thousands of soldiers died. Rupert Brooke takes an angle of humanizing the soldiers that can be contrasted by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which talks more generally of the role and fate of the solider.

While “The Dead” is short, the lines are long and each word provides meaning and tone. The poem does not seem to be referring to soldiers as soldiers but as human beings in what they have experienced and the beauty of life, which is contrasted by death. The first stanza uses romantic lines such as “dawn was theirs” and “felt the quick stir of wonder” and ends with the final words, in a curt 4 word sentence: “All this is ended.” While the rest of the lines of the first stanza flow together and are punctuated by commas, this last statement stands out clearly to show what has been lost. It is of interest that the first stanza does not focus on only the beautiful things in life but also the very human, vulnerable aspects of a full life, as Brooke says, the lost beings were “washed marvelously with sorrow,” demonstrating that life’s sweetness comes from sorrow and joy.

The second stanza moves away from the soldiers and personifies “Frost” as a being that “stays the waves that dance,” which is sort of a bringer of death. Brooke does not describe the death cruelly but rather cold and honourable, shown by the “Frost” leaving “a shining peace, under the night.”  Brooke plies at the emotions of the reader, humanizes the soldier as a being who experienced all that life has to offer but was put out like a flame by a cold but honourable death.

-Lauren