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). 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.