Yes, I get the naïve patriotism and presumption of English superiority in all things, of this world and beyond. Brooke was also not a man without experience (travel, cosmopolitan aquaintances) so it is odd that “a part of all that I have met" (to echo Tennyson) did not rub off on him enough to reign in his sentimentality for Old Blighty. He must have had blinkers on.

This reminded of my junior high school in Winnipeg which had been named after Lord Kitchener. A few years after I was out of there, it was renamed after John Pritchard, an early educator and original owner of the property. There were the usual protests, in the spirit of Brooke.

Agreed, Karl, but there is another for me worse reason. Do you not detect the fascism for example, but even then yet another small problem?

Fascism? Well, there’s a hint of the blood-and-soil motif, but it’s rather attenuated and anyway fascism doesn’t have a monopoly on that. Are you perhaps thinking more of what isn’t present than what is present in the poem? It does lack the salutary antiromantic cynicism of Housman’s poetry and it is insensible of the gruesome horrors of actual warfare. Or the Nietzscheans’ (not Friedrich but those guys in Andromeda) idea that war is purifying (“all evil shed away”)? Or that it implies, in Orwellian Newspeak, not that “war is hell” but that “war is heaven”? I was subsuming those sorts of thing under “naïve patriotism” with the emphasis on “naïve”. The poem has the perspective of a schoolboy getting ready to play cowboys-and-Indians. (Oh oh. I think that was actually one of young Adolf’s favorite childhood games, wasn't it?)

Hey @ Stanley Wilkin. Aren't you going to go beyond mere hints and spell out your own reasons for disliking the poem? Inquiring minds want to know. The suspense is killing me. 😖

Thanks for the tip, Karl.Very useful!

Its the lines 'That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; ' Apart from the inherent creepiness, that his body, because it is English, will enrich the soil of you dirty foreigners, the English body turns into much better muck than foreigners' decaying bodies, it is the sense of delight Brooke shows of the process. Dying as an act of providing wonderful nutrients to a piece of sod, bestowing the superiority of Englishness forever-death as glorious and healthy.

Another poem-puzzle soon.

Extraordinary narcissism. His decaying body is marvellous, the rest of us have to live (sic) with the dross.

Another poem I thoroughly dislike. But why? A modern poet this time: Simon Armitage's REMAINS

The poem

Remains

by Simon Armitage

On another occasion, we got sent out

to tackle looters raiding a bank.

And one of them legs it up the road,

probably armed, possibly not.

Well myself and somebody else and somebody else

are all of the same mind,

so all three of us open fire.

Three of a kind all letting fly, and I swear

I see every round as it rips through his life –

I see broad daylight on the other side.

So we’ve hit this looter a dozen times

and he’s there on the ground, sort of inside out,

pain itself, the image of agony.

One of my mates goes by

and tosses his guts back into his body.

Then he’s carted off in the back of a lorry.

End of story, except not really.

His blood-shadow stays on the street, and out on patrol

I walk right over it week after week.

Then I’m home on leave. But I blink

and he bursts again through the doors of the bank.

Sleep, and he’s probably armed, and possibly not.

Dream, and he’s torn apart by a dozen rounds.

And the drink and the drugs won’t flush him out –

he’s here in my head when I close my eyes,

dug in behind enemy lines,

not left for dead in some distant, sun-stunned, sand-smothered land

or six-feet-under in desert sand,

but near to the knuckle, here and now,

his bloody life in my bloody hands.

Stanley:

"Good" poetry is in the eye of the beholder. Here is a PowerPoint about how bad poetry, if it is bad enough, can become good poetry:

Great fun!

I totally agree with Stanley Wilkin