God, of course, lives in heaven (just in case you were wondering), which is described as being just like England.
Line 14: It turns out that the speaker has been describing an "English heaven" in the last six lines of the poem. The soldier's reward will be both everlasting and intimately familiar to him.
ANALYSIS FORM AND METER.
A Sonnet In Your Bonnet.
What we've got here, gang, is a sonnet. And that means a few things as far as form and meter are concerned. Let's start with the overall form of the poem, shall we? We shall. So check it out: like any sonnet, "The Soldier" has 14 lines. Now, most sonnets are subdivided into two groups: the first eight lines (called the octave) and the last six lines (the sestet). In general, the octave introduces a problem which is then resolved in the sestet. What's more, the ninth line of a sonnet (i.e., the first line of the sestet) is called the "turn" or "volta" because this is where the poem usually starts to shift gears.
In the case of the "The Soldier," for example, the first 8 lines of the poem discuss the possibility of the soldier dying and reflect on the role England has played in his development. In the ninth line, the speaker imagines what it will be like in heaven (hint: like, totally super-awesome), and thus shifts or "turns" the direction of the poem away from the earth and toward an afterlife in the sky.
So that's how the poem is organized in terms of general structure, but how about line for line? Well, just like the good sonnet that it is, "The Soldier" is written in a metrical form called iambic pentameter. If that sounds familiar to you, that's probably because it's the most common meter in English poetry. If you've read any Shakespeare, you've run into this rhythm a time or two, even if you weren't aware of it at the time.
So what does iambic pentameter even mean? You see, every line of iambic pentameter contains five (pent- is the prefix that means five) iambs.
