Line 2: The speaker imagines acquiring a "corner of a foreign field" for his home country, England. Nature is endowed with English-ness here, as it will be again soon.
Line 4: The speaker imagines himself as a part of nature, a pile of "dust concealed" in the earth. Dust here is a metaphor for both the speaker's status as a corpse and for his relationship to the natural world.
Line 5: The speaker is a "dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware." England can't really do these things, so this is a case of personification (the attribution of human qualities to non-human things). Dust is a metaphor for the speaker's relationship to nature and for the fact that he may soon be dead.
Line 6: England gave the speaker "flowers to love" and "ways to roam." England can't actually give anything, really (nice try, though), so this is an example of personification, the attribution of human qualities to non-human things.
Line 8: The speaker was "washed" by England's rivers, and "blest" by her suns. Neither the suns nor the rivers can wash or bless, so this is also personification, the attribution of human qualities to non-human things. Both washing and blessing are metaphors for the way England nurtured the speaker.
HEAVEN AND AFTERLIFE IMAGERY.
SYMBOL ANALYSIS.
When you die, you go to heaven, which will be like paradise. That, at any rate, is what the second half of "The Soldier" tells us. Better than paradise, in fact, heaven for the soldier will be just like England! (We wonder if the angels fly on the left side of the clouds.) If the soldier dies fighting for his country, it won't be so bad, because he will get to go "home." His heaven apparently will be chock full of memories of England-her "sights and sounds," and a whole lot of other good stuff. Like figgy pudding.
Line 10: The speaker describes a "pulse in the eternal mind." The "eternal mind" refers to God's mind (eternal here means that it has never been created and will never die).
