The Full Text of “The Dead (IV)”
1These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
2 Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
3The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
4 And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
5These had seen movement, and heard music; known
6 Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
7Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
8 Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.
9There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter
10And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,
11 Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
12And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white
13 Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
14A width, a shining peace, under the night.
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“The Dead (IV)” Introduction
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"The Dead (IV)" is part of English poet Rupert Brooke's sequence "1914": five linked poems that honored the fallen soldiers of World War I. In this sonnet, a speaker laments all the small joys of life that the dead must leave behind but finds consolation in the thought that death also offers a "shining peace" in which the fallen can rest. Brooke published the poem in his 1915 collection 1914 and Other Poems.
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“The Dead (IV)” Summary
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Once, the dead's hearts were full of happiness mixed with pain. They were wondrously flooded with sorrow, and they were quick to laugh. Getting older and wiser made them kinder. They possessed the sunrise, the sunset, and the colors of nature. The dead saw the world moving and heard the sound of music; they slept and awoke; they fell in love; they were proud of their friendships. They were moved by sudden moments of awe; they sat all alone; they touched flower petals, fur coats, and loved ones' cheeks. That's all over now.
Somewhere, the wind ripples brightly lit waters, making them seem to laugh, all day long. Then, the frost comes along; with a wave of his hand, he freezes the waves' movement and their freewheeling beauty. He leaves behind an endless white light—a growing glow—an empty space—a luminous peace beneath the night sky.
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“The Dead (IV)” Themes
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Death, Loss, and Consolation
In "The Dead (IV)," death washes away all the color and texture of life but also leaves comforting peace in its wake. The dead lose their capacity to feel and perceive, the speaker says, as they're cut off from the "stir of wonder" and the "colours of the earth." However, a glorious "radiance" flows in to fill the gap—a radiance that might suggest both the tranquility of the afterlife and the reverent love that people feel for their dead. Death, this poem suggests, means terrible loss, but it isn't without consolations: the memory of dead loved ones becomes especially significant and beautiful to the living, and the dead themselves rest in a "shining peace."
Life, the poem suggests, is a delicious, textured experience of mingled delight and pain. Being alive means getting to relish both the "joys and cares" of existence, from the pleasure of "proudly" embracing one's friendships to the beauty of "sunset" to the simple rhythms of 'slumber and waking." Even life's "sorrows," seen in the right light, are "marvellous[]," simply because they're part of life, part of the complex experience of living.
What's tragic about death, then, is that it brings all that rich thought and feeling to an end: the dead no longer experience a thing. "All this," for the dead, "is ended."
However, using a complex metaphor in which death is a frost freezing over the moving waters of life, the speaker suggests that death makes space for its own kind of beauty. In the "width" of emptiness that a person's death leaves behind, there's room for a "gathered radiance" to grow: a sense of "shining peace" that persists where all that life and action once was. In other words, the hole where a person used to be becomes a sacred ground for the people left behind; perhaps the dead, too, rest quietly in the eternal peace of the afterlife.
Death is thus both heartbreaking and beautiful. And, as such, it's a pretty good match for the sorrow and joy of life. Death might bring life's rich variety to an end, but it also bestows a consoling "peace" and "glory." The dead, the poem suggests, really do rest in peace, and the living can find comfort in the way that memories of lost loved ones take on a special "radiance."
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Dead (IV)”
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Lines 1-4
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth."The Dead (IV)" opens with a wistful tribute to those who have died and to everything they've had to leave behind. Death, these first lines suggest, means an end to all the everyday loveliness of life: joys so ordinary that one might not appreciate them until they're gone.
Part of the pleasure of being alive, a couple of initial metaphors suggest, is the experience of feeling—and not just feeling happy or satisfied or comfortable, either:
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.The human "heart," these lines suggest, is all the richer for experiencing the "joys and cares" that are "woven" tightly together. And it's not weighed down by "sorrow," but "washed marvellously" with it, rinsed miraculously clean. Not only is "sorrow" marvelous, but it also travels pretty close to "mirth" (or laughter).
The joy of life, in other words, isn't just in the good times, but in the total package of human experience, joy and sorrow together.
There's a similar sense that just being alive is a blessing in these lines:
[...] Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.Living on this planet offers the chance to relish the everyday glory of sunrise, sunset, and the "colours" the sunlight illuminates.
What's more, life offers the chance to grow and to develop wisdom. "The years had given them kindness," the speaker remarks: the "dead" the poem addresses had learned something from their joys and sorrows and sensations.
These first lines, then, paint ordinary, unexceptional life as a lovely gift. In context, this idea feels awfully poignant. This poem is a tribute to "The Dead," to those who no longer get to enjoy all the richness these words describe.
What's more, it's part of Rupert Brooke's "1914," a five-poem sequence honoring the fallen soldiers of World War I. While the poem speaks of "the Dead" more generally, the speaker might have in mind a particular group of the dead, the young men whom the Great War ate up in such terrible numbers.
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Lines 5-8
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.
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Lines 9-12
There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter
And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,
Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
And wandering loveliness. -
Lines 12-14
He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night.
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“The Dead (IV)” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Metaphor
The metaphors in the poem's first lines present feelings as tangible, physical things. In doing so, they evoke the joy of having a living body.
The dead, the speaker remarks in the first line, once enjoyed the rich texture of all kinds of emotions. Their "hearts were woven of human joys and cares." The image of weaving here immediately suggests that this poem won't just be dealing with the pleasures that the dead have to leave behind, but with the whole human experience. "Joys and cares" are knitted together here: you can't have one without the other. In fact, this metaphor suggests, the complex texture of interwoven happiness and sadness is part of what's great about being alive.
There's a similar sense of mingled pleasure and pain in the next line, where the speaker says that the dead's hearts were "washed marvellously with sorrow." Sadness, here, is both cleansing and miraculous. This "wash" of sorrow vividly evokes what it feels like to experience a rush of sadness, like a liquid washing across one's heart. It also suggests that sorrow can feel like being washed clean, refreshed. How "marvellous[]," the speaker suggests: how strange and wonderful it is to experience sadness!
Emotions, these metaphors suggest, aren't just intellectual experiences, but bodily ones. Part of the delight of being alive is getting to feel.
(Besides these metaphors, the poem also uses plenty of personification. Read more about that in the separate "Personification" entry.)
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Personification
Unlock all 218 words of this analysis of Personification in “The Dead (IV),” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Imagery
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Parallelism
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“The Dead (IV)” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Woven of human joys and cares
- Mirth
- Gone proudly friended
- Stays
Woven of human joys and cares-
That is, made up of a mixture of happiness and hardship.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Dead (IV)”
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Form
"The Dead (IV)" is a sonnet, but not an altogether traditional one. Brooke uses elements of both Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets here:
- Like a Petrarchan sonnet, the poem has 14 lines divided into two sections: the octave (or eight-line introductory section) and the sestet (the six-line closing section).
- Unusually, though, the octave doesn't use a Petrarchan ABBA ABBA rhyme scheme, but a Shakespearean ABAB CDCD pattern.
- The sestet also plays around with rhyme. While most Petrarchan sonnets choose either a CDCDCD or CDECDE scheme for this section, here the speaker uses a EEFGFG pattern.
This experimentation with traditional styles makes the poem feel at once familiar and surprising—a combination that suits the speaker's reflections on everyday life, which looks a lot more poignant and beautiful from the perspective of the dead.
The octave/sestet division also draws a clear line between the speaker's reflection on life's beauties and the image of life as water frozen by the "frost" of death—a border separating the everyday world from the "gathered radiance" that comes when life is over.
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Meter
Like most sonnets, "The Dead (IV)" is written in iambic pentameter. That means that each of its lines uses five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 1:
These hearts | were woven | of hu- | man joys | and cares,
(Note that "woven" here is pronounced with one syllable: wov'n.)
Brooke doesn't stick steadily to that rhythm throughout, however. From time to time, he varies the poem's feet for emphasis and music. For instance, listen to the different rhythms in line 5:
These had | seen move- | ment, and | heard mu- | sic; known
The first and third feet here are each the opposite of an iamb: a trochee, with a DUM-da rhythm. And the two strong stresses in "heard music" form a spondee (DUM-DUM).
Variations like these help this wistful speaker's voice to sound natural and reflective: the meter's shape changes to follow the speaker's thoughts.
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Rhyme Scheme
This sonnet's unusual rhyme scheme runs like this:
ABABCDCD EEFGFG
Brooke uses his own variation on two different sonnet traditions here. The poem's rhymes divide it into an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, just like a Petrarchan sonnet. But the octave uses the alternating ABAB CDCD rhymes of a Shakespearean sonnet, and the EEFGFG sestet uses a pattern of Brooke's own invention.
In the first eight lines of the poem, readers might imagine that they're reading a standard Shakespearean sonnet, whose rhymes run ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The introduction of the laughter / after couplet in lines 9-10 thus comes as a little shock, marking a sharp division between the first eight lines (in which the speaker describes the poignant beauty of everyday life) and the closing six (in which the speaker depicts death and the strange "radiance" it leaves in its wake).
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“The Dead (IV)” Speaker
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There's no clear speaker in "The Dead (IV)." Instead, the poem presents a wide view of life and death. That broadness creates a timeless, universal tone, suggesting that what the poem has to say about the beauty of life and the peace of death is the same for everyone, everywhere.
However, the poem might offer a glimpse of Brooke's own well-to-do Oxbridge life in line 8, when the speaker remarks that the dead once "touched flowers and furs and cheeks." Those "flowers and furs" might, on the one hand, just suggest the beauty of nature, the joy of plucking a rose or petting a dog. But "furs," plural, tends to suggest the kind one wears, not the kind that's still on an animal. These lines might thus suggest middle-class turn-of-the-century pleasures: fur coats and cut flowers.
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“The Dead (IV)” Setting
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Just as there's no obvious speaker in "The Dead (IV)," there's no grounded setting; the scenes of life and death the speaker describes could take place in any place or time. However, the context in which this poem was published hints that the speaker is thinking of one group of the "dead" in particular. This is the fourth poem of Brooke's "1914," a sequence celebrating and lamenting the fallen soldiers of World War I. "The Dead (IV)" and its companions became famous and popular among post-war mourners for their respectful contemplation of what the war dead sacrificed and how they might be honored.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Dead (IV)”
Literary Context
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) was one of the most famous and popular of the British soldier poets of World War I. He joined the English Navy in 1914, the first year of the war, and he died the following year—not in battle, but from an infection following a mosquito bite. His poetic influences include W.B. Yeats, Charles Baudelaire, John Keats, and Oscar Wilde.
Brooke's poetry was immensely successful from its first publication, capturing the imagination of a nation at war. "The Dead (IV)" is part of a sequence titled "1914," which also includes a companion sonnet, "The Dead (III)," and Brooke's most famous poem, "The Soldier." Brooke's poetry was seen as embodying the very spirit of the loyal soldier, willing to lay down his life for the good of his country. In fact, Winston Churchill, England's prime minister during World War II, described Brooke as "all that one could wish England's noblest sons to be."
Brooke's wartime poetry tends to reflect a romantic notion of war and self-sacrifice. This poem, for instance, presents a vision of a "shining peace" in which the honored dead can rest. Those of Brooke's contemporaries who lived longer and saw more of the war took a dimmer view: for instance, compare this poem's luminous, idealized imagery to the nightmare vision (and disgusted cynicism) of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est."
Historical Context
This poem appeared in a sequence commemorating the dead of World War I—a war known, at the time it was fought, as "the war to end all wars" (a phrase that proved tragically inaccurate when World War II broke out a generation later).
WWI began when assassin Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which ruled a large section of Central and Eastern Europe at the time). Austria-Hungary accused their enemy Serbia of masterminding this assassination; Germany supported Austria-Hungary; Russia supported Serbia. Soon, chains of pre-existing alliances had pulled nearly all of Europe (and countries beyond) into bloody trench warfare, a snowballing catastrophe that would claim about 16 million lives.
WWI was horrendously destructive. Life on the battlefields of Europe was terrifying and deadly, and unsanitary conditions at the front caused frequent disease. But Brooke, who died early in the conflict and off the battlefield, saw virtually none of this horror. This poem and its companions reflect a vision of war and death as glorious and ennobling—a vision that would make Brooke a popular patriotic poet, his work often quoted at government memorial services or engraved on monuments.
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More “The Dead (IV)” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to the poem read aloud by the great Shakespearean actor Sir John Gielgud.
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A Celebration of Brooke — Watch a short documentary on Brooke's life and work.
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Brooke's Legacy — Visit the website of the Rupert Brooke Society to learn about his lasting influence.
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A Manuscript of the Poem — See a draft of this poem in Brooke's own handwriting.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Brooke's life and work at the Poetry Foundation.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Rupert Brooke
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