TODAY 109 YEARS AGO ILLUSTRATION OF A BRITISH SOLDIER LAYING IN A FIELD OF POPPIES BY @JENBETTON

 Today 109 years ago Illustration of a British soldier laying in a field of poppies by @jenbetton.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.

There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust conceal'd;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,A body of England's, breathing English air.Wash'd by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

• The Soldier was written while Brooke was on leave at Christmas, 1914; it was the final sonnet in a collection of five that he entitled "1914" - his reflections on the outbreak of war. They were first published in the magazine New Numbers in January 1915.

Rupert Brooke never experienced front-line combat, but was sailing for Gallipoli with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force when he contracted blood poisoning from a mosquito bite.

He died on April 23 1915 (St George's Day), aged 27, and was buried on the island of Skyros, in an olive grove chosen by his friend William Denis Browne (who was killed at Gallipoli two months later). Recalling Brooke's death, Browne had written:I sat with Rupert.

At four o'clock he became weaker, and at 4.46 he died, with the sun shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea-breeze blowing through the door and the shaded windows.

No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme."

Nineteen days before Brooke's death, on Easter Sunday, Dean William Ralph Inge had read The Soldier from the pulpit of St Paul's as part of his sermon.

That sonnet was published in the Times the next day to great acclaim - as, shortly after, was Winston Churchill's obituary of Brooke.