Peace, in this sonnet, is not what arrives when the fighting stops. It is what Rupert Brooke imagines you find by going in. The poem opens the sequence "1914", and that date puts it in the first year of the First World War, when the conflict could still be pictured as noble and clean. Brooke died in 1915, on service but from illness rather than in battle. He never wrote from the experience of the war's worst years, which is worth remembering as you read.
The central idea is that war offers release and purification. The speaker thanks God for waking a generation "from sleeping" and giving it "hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power". These are the words you would use for an athlete in training or a blade being honed. The poem's best-known image follows: the young turn "as swimmers into cleanness leaping". A dive is voluntary, physical and exhilarating, and the image makes enlistment sound like a baptism, a plunge that washes off the grime of ordinary life.
That life is described with open contempt. The world is "old and cold and weary", and the repeated "and" makes the line sag with tiredness. Then come "sick hearts that honour could not move", "half-men", "dirty songs" and "the little emptiness of love". The word "little" shrinks love to nothing. The target is never named, so the poem draws its energy from disgust rather than from any detail of what is being left behind. There is a small irony in the rhyme, too. "Move" and "love" look like a pair on the page but do not sound alike, so the neat music slips in the very line that dismisses love and honour.
The form is a sonnet, and it follows the turn you would expect. The octave rhymes ABABCDCD and describes departure. The sestet begins with "Oh!" and rhymes EFGEFG, describing arrival. The rhythm is a steady iambic pentameter, softened by feminine endings in "sleeping", "leaping", "mending" and "ending". These unstressed final syllables give the verse a lilt that is almost a lullaby. Sleep also changes meaning between the halves. In the octave it is something to be woken from, but in the sestet it is where healing happens: "no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending".
The sestet is also where the poem is vaguest. Lines 9 and 12 both end on "there", a word rhyming with itself, and the poem never says where "there" is. Death is implied for five lines before it is named. Meanwhile everything painful is minimised by small words: "Naught broken save this body, lost but breath". Agony exists, but "that has ending". The final line, "the worst friend and enemy is but Death", puts two opposites side by side and then shrinks them with "but". Death is the last word, and it is made to sound almost companionable. The half-rhyme of "breath" and "Death" binds the two together.
The title, "Peace", therefore works as a kind of argument. The sonnet offers a sense of rest after sacrifice, an inner calm rather than a political settlement.
What makes the poem significant is as much what it leaves out as what it says. There are no wounds, no mud, no named enemy, not even a country. War is an abstraction of cleanness, courage and sleep. The poem is a vivid record of the idealism with which the war was first imagined, and it still shows how persuasive that idealism could sound. Read beside the poetry that later came from the trenches, the gap between the vision and the reality becomes part of the poem's meaning. A reader today can admire its music and still feel how much it asks the word "peace" to carry.