The Analysis of the Soldier from Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspectives

The Soldier is a sonnet written in 1914 by Rupert Brook, a British war poet. The paper aims at analyzing the poem by applying M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as a theoretical framework. The study mainly adopts a qualitative methodology to analyze the text by text linguistics. However, the quantitative methodology is also used to calculate the proportions of each metafunctional process in this poem. The main findings of this paper are: 1) Topic theme: the themes of the poem are I, dust, England, this heart, et., which show the soldie'’s love and gratefulness for England; 2) The focus of tense: The Soldier starts with a conditional clause and then uses present and past tense to create a context as if he was depicting a real external world instead of an imagination from the inner world. 3) Patterning and re-patterning: The patterning analysis shows the soldier in the poem emphasizes his motivation for sacrificing and spreading the precious things in England who had brought him up. The paper concludes that The Soldier shows a strong sense of patriotism, which might be an approval for the former literary studies of this poem from linguistic aspects.