Des Pond of Slough spotted this in an article about Rupert Brooke:*
Strange to use the correct and the incorrect relative pronoun in the same sentence, and most probably a typographical error.
Elsewhere, the article adopts some odd punctuation in the presentation of Brooke’s poetry:
The punctuation strongly suggests that the writer hasn’t understood the meaning of the lines. The passage is usually presented and punctuated like this:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
It’s perfectly acceptable to quote a few lines of poetry without presenting them line-by-line like this (a method also known as insetting or displaying), as the source presents them; but the quotation should be introduced by a colon, not a dash (and certainly not by a hyphen), and must otherwise exactly reproduce the original, including the lines’ initial capital letters, which are vital in a run-on quotation to show where the lines
break:
He
left behind poems which were to cement his reputation, most notably The
Soldier, with its iconic opening lines: “If I should die think only
this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever
England.”
An academic text would use different conventions, distinguishing the title with quotation marks and marking line breaks less ambiguously by using a forward slash / or a vertical line | between the lines:
He left behind poems which were to cement his reputation, most notably ‘The Soldier’, with its iconic opening lines: ‘If I should die think only this of me:/ That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England.’
All these methods maintain the original syntax so as not to compromise the meaning.
* The article isn’t implying that poets are innocent, pure and clean-living, as this out-of-context quotation suggests. It discusses Nigel Jones’s new biography of Brooke, which shows his ‘golden boy’ persona to be a later construct, intended to recruit young men into the forces in the Second World War.
