Comparing and Contrasting “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke and “Colonization in Reverse” by Louise Bennett.

A poem is a verbal composition which is designed to communicate or express ideas, emotions or experience in a very imaginative way by the use of language giving certain structure and text type, tone, images or figurative languages, and stylistic devices. It can use literary techniques such as metaphor, rhyme, irony, symbolism, and images are used in a poetic vision.

 “The Soldier” was made in 1914 by Ruper Brooke. He was an English poet known for this poem at the First World War; specially this sonnet because it talked about the war and sadly he died a year after publishing it. He was also recognized because he was a very good looking man and was called “the handsomest young man in England". Also, there is another poem I’m going to talk about that is “Colonization in Reverse” written by Louise Bennett in the year of 1966.  She was a Jamaican folklorist, writer, and artist affectively known by leading humorous roles in Jamaican television shows. The poem of “Colonization in Reverse” portrayed the Jamaican people experience with phrases that meant the racial inequality that citizens lived in those times and how they needed to leave the country to have a better life and employment.

 The communicative purpose or objectives that the author has to make “The Soldier” is to let people know the accomplishments that a soldier had in those days and England, which was the country that they were fighting for. The “Colonization in Reverse” poem made viewers to notice that life for Jamaican people was not easy and that they had to go to England to have a non racial life and to live and express their feelings through the music to achieve the way of thinking of the people and the author. We can see that in both cases the authors are referring in the way that people are suffering in order to come out to a better place or how they are fighting for themselves to be happy and to honor de descendants.

The first poem is using a proper tone or formal and serious because the author is giving details in base of the war and representing the soldiers that died for the country in those days of the World War I, the author is using. In the second poem it is saying things in a more informal way because, as Mexicans that we are, we are not accustomed to those words or we see the Jamaican words as people that don’t know how to speak such in the words as wat, colonizing, tousan, de, etc.

In “The Soldier” the author is using a rhyme which is the sonnet that means that it is formed by an octet in the (abab cdcd) and finishing with a sestet (efg efg) form. In contrast with this one, the other one is written in a form as a song and without any rhyme. The images in the language used at the poems are very important because they give the explanation of all objects that are near or how is the environment, in “The Soldier” sonnet for example in “Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home” or in “In hearts at peace, under an English heaven” we could see that the author is representing England in peace at the end and that through everything they had lived for, now they are in harmony.   And in the second poem it is saying:

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

This means that people in Jamaica are so tired of living like that, that they are now getting into a new life in England and that they are preparing their luggage.

It is easily to difference both “The Soldier” and “Colonization in Reverse” poems because they were so different in the tone or in the rhymes that they had, each one with its native language as English or Jamaican, which was kind of difficult to understand due to its spelling and grammar, and the period of time where they were made up of. They differed in most of the things, but the one that they had in common was that they both dedicated their poems to the nation, to how people give their lives or suffer due to their countries.


Words: 721 :)