c fervor and his death shortly after publication of a glowing piece on the glory of the English landscape provided the English public with a ready-made hero and martyr.
We find, therefore, in Brooke's poetry a nationalistic sense which was borne of idealistic thinking but which had little to do with actual war--Brooke saw practically no actual fighting himself, dying of food poisoning.
Brooke writes of the peace of death as if it were a blessing delivered to young men by God, "the laughing heart's long peace" ("Peace").
His poem "The Soldier" stands in even greater contrast to the anti-war poems of, for example, Owen. Brooke writes:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
...