THE COLLECTED POEMS OF RUPERT BROOKE
by Rupert Brooke
[British Poet — 1887-1915.]
1915 edition
A new Appendix is included in this etext,
consisting of poems ABOUT
or TO Rupert Brooke.
The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke
with an introduction by George
Edward Woodberry
and a biographical note by Margaret Lavington
Born at Rugby, August 3, 1887
Fellow of King’s College,
Cambridge, 1913
Sub-Lieutenant, R.N.V.R., September, 1914
Antwerp Expedition, October, 1914
Sailed with British Mediterranean
Expeditionary Force, February 28, 1915
Died in the Aegean, April 23,
1915
Introduction
I
Rupert Brooke was both fair to see and winning in his ways. There was at
the first contact both bloom and charm; and most of all there was life. To
use the word his friends describe him by, he was “vivid”. This vitality,
though manifold in expression, is felt primarily in his sensations —
surprise mingled with delight —
This is life’s “first fine rapture”. It makes him patient to name over
those myriad things (each of which seems like a fresh discovery) curious
but potent, and above all common, that he “loved”, — he the “Great
Lover”. Lover of what, then? Why, of
and the like, through thirty lines of exquisite words; and he is
captivated by the multiple brevity of these vignettes of sense, keen,
momentary, ecstatic with the morning dip of youth in the wonderful stream.
The poem is a catalogue of vital sensations and “dear names” as well. “All
these have been my loves.”
The spring of these emotions is the natural body, but it sends pulsations
far into the spirit. The feeling rises in direct observation, but it is
soon aware of the “outlets of the sky”. He sees objects practically
unrelated, and links them in strings; or he sees them pictorially; or, he
sees pictures immersed as it were in an atmosphere of thought. When the
process is complete, the thought suggests the picture and is its origin.
Then the Great Lover revisits the bottom of the monstrous world, and
imaginatively and thoughtfully recreates that strange under-sea, whose
glooms and gleams and muds are well known to him as a strong and delighted
swimmer; or, at the last, drifts through the dream of a South Sea lagoon,
still with a philosophical question in his mouth. Yet one can hardly speak
of “completion”. These are real first flights. What we have in this volume
is not so much a work of art as an artist in his birth trying the wings of
genius.
The poet loves his new-found element. He clings to mortality; to life, not
thought; or, as he puts it, to the concrete, — let the abstract “go
pack!” “There’s little comfort in the wise,” he ends. But in the unfolding
of his precocious spirit, the literary control comes uppermost; his boat,
finding its keel, swings to the helm of mind. How should it be otherwise
for a youth well-born, well-bred, in college air? Intellectual primacy
showed itself to him in many wandering “loves”, fine lover that he was;
but in the end he was an intellectual lover, and the magnet seems to have
been especially powerful in the ghosts of the men of “wit”, Donne, Marvell
— erudite lords of language, poets in another world than ours, a
less “ample ether”, a less “divine air”, our fathers thought, but poets of
“eternity”. A quintessential drop of intellect is apt to be in poetic
blood. How Platonism fascinates the poets, like a shining bait! Rupert
Brooke will have none of it; but at a turn of the verse he is back at it,
examining, tasting, refusing. In those alternate drives of the thought in
his South Sea idyl (clever as tennis play) how he slips from phenomenon to
idea and reverses, happy with either, it seems, “were t’other dear charmer
away”. How bravely he tries to free himself from the cling of earth, at
the close of the “Great Lover”! How little he succeeds! His muse knew only
earthly tongues, — so far as he understood.
Why this persistent cling to mortality, — with its quick-coming cry
against death and its heaped anathemas on the transformations of decay? It
is the old story once more: — the vision of the first poets, the
world that “passes away”. The poetic eye of Keats saw it, —
The reflective mind of Arnold meditated it, —
So Rupert Brooke, —
And yet, —
again, —
again, best of all, in the last word, —
He cannot forego his sensations, that “box of compacted sweets”. He even
forefeels a ghostly landscape where two shall go wandering through the
night, “alone”. So the faith that broke its chrysalis in the first
disillusionment of boyhood, in “Second Best”, beautiful with the burden of
Greek lyricism, ends triumphant with the spirit still unsubdued. —
So go, “with unreluctant tread”. But in the disillusionment of beauty and
of love there is an older tone. With what bitter savor, with what
grossness of diction, caught from the Elizabethan and satirical elements
in his culture, he spends anger in words! He reacts, he rebels, he storms.
A dozen poems hardly exhaust his gall. It is not merely that beauty and
joy and love are transient, now, but in their going they are corrupted
into their opposites, — ugliness, pain, indifference. And his anger
once stilled by speech, what lassitude follows!
Life, in this volume, is hardly less evident by its ecstasy than by its
collapse. It is a book of youth, sensitive, vigorous, sound; but it is the
fruit of intensity, and bears the traits. The search for solitude, the
relief from crowds, the open door into nature; the sense of flight and
escape; the repeated thought of safety, the insistent fatigue, the cry for
sleep; — all these bear confession in their faces. “Flight”, “Town
and Country”, “The Voice”, are eloquent of what they leave untold; and the
climax of “Retrospect”, —
or the sestet of “Waikiki”, or the whole fainting sonnet entitled “A
Memory”, belong to the nadir of vitality. At moments weariness set in like
a spiritual tide. I associate, too, with such moods, psychologically at
least, his visions of the “arrested moment”, as in “Dining-Room Tea”,
— a sort of trance state — or in the pendant sonnet. Analogous
moods are not infrequent in the great poets. Rupert Brooke seems to have
faltered, nervously, at times; these poems mirror faithfully such moments.
But even when the image of life, imaginative or real, falters so, how
essentially vital it still is, and clothed in an exquisite body of words
like the traditional “rainbow hues of the dying fish”! For I cannot
express too strongly my admiration of the literary sense of this young
poet, and my delight in it. “All these have been my loves,” he says, if I
may repeat the phrase; but he seems to have loved the words, as much as
the things, — “dear names”, he adds. The born man of letters speaks
there. So, when his pulse is at its lowest, he cannot forget the beautiful
surface of his South Sea idyls or of versified English gardens and lanes.
He cared as much for the expression as for the thing, which is what makes
a man of letters. So fixed is this habit that his art, truly, is
independent of his bodily state. In his poems of “collapse” as in those of
“ecstasy” he seems to me equally master of his mood, — like those
poets who are “for all time”. His literary skill in verse was ripe, how
long so ever he might have to live.
II
To come, then, to art, which is above personality, what of that? Art is,
at most, but the mortal relic of genius; yet it is true of it that, like
Ozymandias’ statue, “nothing beside remains”. Rupert Brooke was already
perfected in verbal and stylistic execution. He might have grown in
variety, richness and significance, in scope and in detail, no doubt; but
as an artisan in metrical words and pauses, he was past apprenticeship. He
was still a restless experimenter, but in much he was a master. In the
brief stroke of description, which he inherited from his early attachment
to the concrete; in the rush of words, especially verbs; in the
concatenation of objects, the flow of things ‘en masse’ through his verse,
still with the impulse of “the bright speed” he had at the source; in his
theatrical impersonation of abstractions, as in “The Funeral of Youth”,
where for once the abstract and the concrete are happily fused; — in
all these there are the elements, and in the last there is the perfection,
of mastery. For one thing, he knew how to end. It is with him a dramatic
secret. The brief stroke does this work time and time again in his verse,
nowhere better than in “at dead YOUTH’s funeral:” all were there, —
The poem is like a vision of an old time MASQUE: —
How vivid! The lines owe something to his eye for costume, for staging;
but, as mere picture writing, it is as firm as if carved on an obelisk.
And as he reconciled concrete and abstract here, so he had left his short
breath, in those earlier lines, behind, and had come into the long sweep
and open water of great style: —
Or; —
Or, more briefly, —
And this, —
Such lines as these, apart from their beauty, are in the best manner of
English poetic style. So, in many minor ways, he shuffled contrast and
climax, and the like, adept in the handling of poetic rhetoric that he had
come to be; but in three ways he was conspicuously successful in his art.
The first of these — they are all in the larger forms of art —
is the dramatic sonnet, by which I do not mean merely a sonnet in dialogue
or advancing by simple contrast; but one in which there may be these
things, but also there is a tragic reversal or its equivalent. Not to
consider it too curiously, take “The Hill”. This sonnet is beautiful in
action and diction; its eloquence speeds it on with a lift; the situation
is the very crest of life; then, —
The dramatic sonnet in English has not gone beyond that, for beauty, for
brevity, for tragic effect, — nor, I add, for unspoken loyalty to
reality. Reality was, perhaps, what he most dearly wished for; here he
achieved it. In many another sonnet he won the laurel; but if I were to
venture to choose, it is in the dramatic handling of the sonnet that he is
most individual and characteristic.
The second great success of his genius, formally considered, lay in the
narrative idyl, either in the Miltonic way of flashing bits of English
country landscape before the eye, as in “Grantchester”, or by applying
essentially the same method to the water world of fishes or the South Sea
world, both on a philosophic background. These are all master poems of a
kaleidoscopic beauty and charm, where the brief pictures play in and out
of a woven veil of thought, irony, mood, with a delightful intellectual
pleasuring. He thoroughly enjoys doing the poetical magic. Such bits of
English retreats or Pacific paradises, so full of idyllic charm, exquisite
in image and movement, are among the rarest of poetic treasures. The
thought of Milton and of Marvell only adds an old world charm to the most
modern of the works of the Muses. What lightness of touch, what ease of
movement, what brilliancy of hue! What vivacity throughout! Even in
“Retrospect”, what actuality!
And the third success is what I should call the “melange”. That is, the
method of indiscrimination by which he gathers up experience, and pours it
out again in language, with full disregard of its relative values. His
good taste saves him from what in another would be shipwreck, but this
indifference to values, this apparent lack of selection in material, while
at times it gives a huddled flow, more than anything else “modernizes” the
verse. It yields, too, an effect of abundant vitality, and it makes facile
the change from grave to gay and the like. The “melange”, as I call it, is
rather an innovation in English verse, and to be found only rarely. It
exists, however; and especially it was dear to Keats in his youth. It is
by excellent taste, and by style, that the poet here overcomes its early
difficulties.
In these three formal ways, besides in minor matters, it appears to me
that Rupert Brooke, judged by the most orthodox standards, had succeeded
in poetry.
III
But in his first notes, if I may indulge my private taste, I find more of
the intoxication of the god. These early poems are the lyrical cries and
luminous flares of a dawn, no doubt; but they are incarnate of youth.
Capital among them is “Blue Evening”. It is original and complete. In its
whispering embraces of sense, in the terror of seizure of the spirit, in
the tranquil euthanasia of the end by the touch of speechless beauty, it
seems to me a true symbol of life whole and entire. It is beautiful in
language and feeling, with an extraordinary clarity and rise of power;
and, above all, though rare in experience, it is real. A young poet’s
poem; but it has a quality never captured by perfect art. A poem for
poets, no doubt; but that is the best kind. So, too, the poem, entitled
“Sleeping Out”, charms me and stirs me with its golden clangors and crying
flames of emotion as it mounts up to “the white one flame”, to “the
laughter and the lips of light”. It is like a holy Italian picture,
— remote, inaccessible, alone. The “white flame” seems to have had a
mystic meaning to the boy; it occurs repeatedly. And another poem, —
not to make too long a story of my private enthusiasms — “Ante
Aram”, — wakes all my classical blood, —
But these things are arcana.
IV
CONTENTS
Pine-Trees and the Sky: Evening
On the Death of Smet-Smet, the
Hippopotamus-GoddessSonnet: “Oh! Death will find me, long before I
tire”Sonnet: “I said I splendidly loved you; it’s
not true”Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body
He Wonders Whether to Praise or to Blame Her
A Memory (From a sonnet-sequence)
The Funeral of Youth: Threnody
The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
The True Beatitude (Bouts-Rimes)
1905-1908
Second Best
Day That I Have Loved
Sleeping Out: Full Moon
In Examination
Pine-Trees and the Sky: Evening
Wagner
The Vision of the Archangels
Seaside
On the Death of Smet-Smet, the Hippopotamus-Goddess
The Song of the Pilgrims
The Song of the Beasts
Failure
Ante Aram
Dawn
The Call
The Wayfarers
The Beginning
1908-1911
Sonnet: “Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire”
Sonnet: “I said I splendidly loved you; it’s not true”
Success
Dust
Kindliness
Mummia
The Fish
Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body
Flight
The Hill
The One Before the Last
The Jolly Company
The Life Beyond
Dead Men’s Love
Town and Country
Paralysis
Menelaus and Helen
Libido
Jealousy
Blue Evening
The Charm
Finding
Song
The Voice
Dining-Room Tea
The Goddess in the Wood
A Channel Passage
Victory
Day and Night
Experiments
Choriambics — I
Choriambics — II
Desertion
1914
I. Peace
II. Safety
III. The Dead
IV. The Dead
V. The Soldier
The Treasure
The South Seas
Tiare Tahiti
Retrospect
The Great Lover
Heaven
Doubts
There’s Wisdom in Women
He Wonders Whether to Praise or to Blame Her
A Memory (From a sonnet-sequence)
One Day
Waikiki
Hauntings
Clouds
Mutability
Other Poems
The Busy Heart
Love
Unfortunate
The Chilterns
Home
The Night Journey
Song
Beauty and Beauty
The Way That Lovers Use
Mary and Gabriel
The Funeral of Youth: Threnody
Grantchester
The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
Fafaia
Appendix
NOTE
The Appendix contains: (1) the only two coherent fragments found in the
notebook which Brooke used in the last month of his life; a little song,
written, I think on his travels; and a poem, dating probably from 1912,
which for some reason he left unrevised; (2) a few “lighter” poems which I
dare say he would have printed on their merits if he had published a
volume in which they would not have been out of key. Two of these, the
“Letter to a Live Poet” and “The Little Dog’s Day,” were written for
Westminster Gazette competitions, in which they won prizes. Edward Marsh
Fragment
The Dance
Song
Sometimes Even Now . . .
Sonnet: in Time of Revolt
A Letter to a Live Poet
Fragment on Painters
The True Beatitude (Bouts-Rimes)
Sonnet Reversed
It’s Not Going to Happen Again
The Little Dog’s Day
1 (return)
[ Now we’re off]
2 (return)
[ I’ll make them sit up.]
3 (return)
[ Pronounce either to suit
rhyme.]
[End of Poems.]
London, October, 1915.
Rupert Brooke: A Biographical Note
Any biographical account of Rupert Brooke must of necessity be brief; yet
it is well to know the facts of his romantic career, and to see him as far
as may be through the eyes of those who knew him (the writer was
unfortunately not of this number) in order the better to appreciate his
work.
He was born at Rugby on August 3, 1887, his father, William Brooke, being
an assistant master at the school. Here Brooke was educated, and in 1905
won a prize for a poem called “The Bastille”, which has been described as
“fine, fluent stuff.” He took a keen interest in every form of athletic
sport, and played both cricket and football for the school. Though he
afterwards dropped both these games, he developed as a sound tennis
player, was a great walker, and found joy in swimming, like Byron and
Swinburne, especially by night. He delighted in the Russian ballet and
went again and again to a good Revue.
In 1906 he went up to King’s College, Cambridge, where he made innumerable
friends, and was considered one of the leading intellectuals of his day,
among his peers being James Elroy Flecker, himself a poet of no small
achievement, who died at Davos only a few months ago. Mr. Ivan Lake, the
editor of the ‘Bodleian’, a contemporary at Cambridge, tells me that
although the two men moved in different sets, they frequented the same
literary circles. Brooke, however, seldom, if ever, spoke at the Union,
but was a member of the Cambridge Fabian Society, and held the posts of
Secretary and President in turn. His socialism was accompanied by a
passing phase of vegetarianism, and with the ferment of youth working
headily within him he could hardly escape the charge of being a crank, but
“a crank, if a little thing, makes revolutions,” and Brooke’s youthful
extravagances were utterly untinged with decadence. He took his classical
tripos in 1909, and after spending some time as a student in Munich,
returned to live near Cambridge at the Old Vicarage in “the lovely hamlet,
Grantchester.” “It was there,” writes Mr. Raglan H. E. H. Somerset in a
letter I am privileged to quote, “that I used to wake him on Sunday
mornings to bathe in the dam above Byron’s Pool. His bedroom was always
littered with books, English, French, and German, in wild disorder. About
his bathing one thing stands out; time after time he would try to dive; he
always failed and came absolutely flat, but seemed to like it, although it
must have hurt excessively.” (This was only when he was learning. Later he
became an accomplished diver.) “Then we used to go back and feed,
sometimes in the Orchard and sometimes in the Old Vicarage Garden, on eggs
and that particular brand of honey referred to in the ‘Grantchester’ poem.
In those days he always dressed in the same way: cricket shirt and
trousers and no stockings; in fact, ‘Rupert’s mobile toes’ were a subject
for the admiration of his friends.”
Brooke occupied himself mainly with writing. Poems, remarkable for a happy
spontaneity such as characterized the work of T. E. Brown, the Manx poet,
appeared in the ‘Gownsman’, the ‘Cambridge Review’, the ‘Nation’, the
‘English Review’, and the ‘Westminster Gazette’. Students of the “Problem
Page” in the ‘Saturday Westminster’ knew him as a brilliant competitor who
infused the purely academic with the very spirit of youth.
To all who knew him, the man himself was at least as important as his
work. “As to his talk” — I quote again from Mr. Somerset — “he
was a spendthrift. I mean that he never saved anything up as those writer
fellows so often do. He was quite inconsequent and just rippled on, but
was always ready to attack a careless thinker. On the other hand, he was
extremely tolerant of fools, even bad poets who are the worst kind of
fools — or rather the hardest to bear — but that was kindness
of heart.”
Of his personal appearance a good deal has been said. “One who knew him,”
writing in one of the daily papers, said that “to look at, he was part of
the youth of the world. He was one of the handsomest Englishmen of his
time. His moods seemed to be merely a disguise for the radiance of an
early summer’s day.”
Mr. Edward Thomas speaks of him as “a golden young Apollo” who made
friends, admirers, adorers, wherever he went. “He stretched himself out,
drew his fingers through his waved fair hair, laughed, talked indolently,
and admired as much as he was admired. . . . He was tall, broad, and easy
in his movements. Either he stooped, or he thrust his head forward
unusually much to look at you with his steady blue eyes.”
On Mr. H. W. Nevinson, who, in a fleeting editorial capacity, sent for
Brooke to come and discuss his poems, he made a similar impression:
“Suddenly he came — an astonishing apparition in any newspaper
office: loose hair of deep, browny-gold; smooth, ruddy face; eyes not gray
or bluish-white, but of living blue, really like the sky, and as frankly
open; figure not very tall, but firm and strongly made, giving the sense
of weight rather than of speed and yet so finely fashioned and healthy
that it was impossible not to think of the line about ‘a pard-like
spirit’. He was dressed just in the ordinary way, except that he wore a
low blue collar, and blue shirt and tie, all uncommon in those days.
Evidently he did not want to be conspicuous, but the whole effect was
almost ludicrously beautiful.”
Notions of height are always comparative, and it will be noticed that Mr.
Nevinson and Mr. Thomas differ in their ideas. Mr. Edward Marsh, however,
Brooke’s executor and one of his closest friends — indeed the friend
of all young poets — tells me that he was about six feet, so that
all doubt on this minor point may be set at rest.
He had been in Munich, Berlin, and in Italy, and in May, 1913, he left
England again for a wander year, passing through the United States and
Canada on his way to the South Seas. Perhaps some of those who met him in
Boston and elsewhere will some day contribute their quota to the bright
record of his life. His own letters to the ‘Westminster Gazette’, though
naturally of unequal merit, were full of humorous delight in the New
World. In one of his travel papers he described the city of Quebec as
having “the radiance and repose of an immortal.” “That, in so many words,”
wrote Mr. Walter de la Mare, “brings back his living remembrance. . . .
With him there was a happy shining impression that he might have just come
— that very moment — from another planet, one well within the
solar system, but a little more like Utopia than ours.” Not even
Stevenson, it would seem, excited a greater enthusiasm among his friends;
and between the two men an interesting parallel might be drawn. Brooke
made a pilgrimage to Stevenson’s home in Samoa, and his life in the
Pacific found full and happy expression in his verse. His thoughts,
however, turned longingly to England, the land “where Men with Splendid
Hearts may go,” and he reappeared from the ends of the earth among his
friends as apparently little changed “as one who gaily and laughingly goes
to bed and gaily and laughingly comes down next morning after a perfectly
refreshing sleep.”
Then came the War. “Well, if Armageddon’s ON,” he said, “I suppose one
should be there.” It was a characteristic way of putting it. He obtained a
commission in the Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division in September,
and was quickly ordered on the disastrous if heroic expedition to Antwerp.
Here he had his first experience of war, lying for some days in trenches
shelled by the distant German guns. Then followed a strange retreat by
night along roads lit by the glare of burning towns, and swarming with
pitiful crowds of Belgian refugees. Yet as Mr. Walter de la Mare said of
him, when he returned from Antwerp, “Ulysses himself at the end of his
voyagings was not more quietly accustomed to the shocks of novelty.”
On Brooke, as on many other young men, to whom the gift of self-expression
has perhaps been denied, the war had a swiftly maturing influence. Much of
the impetuosity of youth fell away from him. The boy who had been rather
proud of his independent views — a friend relates how at the age of
twelve he sat on the platform at a pro-Boer meeting — grew suddenly,
it seemed, into a man filled with the love of life indeed, but inspired
most of all with the love of England. Fortunately for himself and for us,
Brooke’s patriotism found passionate voice in the sonnets which are
rightly given pride of place in the 1914 section of this volume. Mr.
Clement Shorter, who gives us the skeleton of a bibliography that is all
too brief, draws special attention to ‘New Numbers’, a quarterly
publication issued in Gloucestershire, to which Brooke contributed in
February, April, August, and December of last year, his fellow poets being
Lascelles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater, and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. He
spent the winter in training at Blandford Camp in Dorsetshire, and sailed
with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on the last day of
February. He had a presentiment of his death, but he went, as so many
others have gone,
He never reached the Dardanelles. He went first to Lemnos and then to
Egypt. Early in April he had a touch of sunstroke from which he recovered;
but he died from blood-poisoning on board a French hospital ship at Scyros
on Friday, April 23rd — died for England on the day of St. Michael
and Saint George. He was buried at night, by torchlight, in an olive grove
about a mile inland. “If you go there,” writes Mr. Stephen Graham, “you
will find a little wooden cross with just his name and the date of his
birth and his death marked on it in black.” A few days later the news of
his death was published in the ‘Times’ with the following appreciation:
“W. S. C.” writes: “Rupert Brooke is dead. A telegram from the Admiral at
Lemnos tells us that this life has closed at the moment when it seemed to
have reached its springtime. A voice had become audible, a note had been
struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility
of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other —
more able to express their thoughts of self-surrender, and with a power to
carry comfort to those who watch them so intently from afar. The voice has
been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will
linger.
“During the last few months of his life, months of preparation in gallant
comradeship and open air, the poet-soldier told with all the simple force
of genius the sorrow of youth about to die, and the sure, triumphant
consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit. He expected to die; he was
willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and
he advanced toward the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction
of the rightness of his country’s cause and a heart devoid of hate for
fellowmen.
“The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable war
sonnets which he has left behind will be shared by many thousands of young
men moving resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hardest, the
cruellest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought.
They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself. Joyous,
fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and
body, ruled by high, undoubting purpose, he was all that one would wish
England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most
precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely
proffered.”
“W. S. C.”, as many probably guessed at the time, was the Rt. Hon. Winston
Spencer Churchill, a personal friend and warm admirer of the poet. Many
other tributes followed, notably from an anonymous writer in the
‘Spectator’, from Mr. Walter de la Mare, Mr. Edward Thomas, Mr. Holbrook
Jackson, Mr. Jack Collings Squire, Mr. James Douglas, Mr. Drinkwater, Mr.
Gibson, and Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie. From most of these writers I have
already quoted at some length, but space must yet be found for the last
three, the surviving members of the brilliant quartette who produced ‘New
Numbers’. Mr. Drinkwater wrote as follows: “There can have been no man of
his years in England who had at once so impressive a personality and so
inevitable an appeal to the affection of every one who knew him, while
there has not been, I think, so grievous a loss to poetry since the death
of Shelley. Some of us who knew him may live to be old men, but life is
not likely to give us any richer memory than his; and the passion and
shapely zest that are in his work will pass safely to the memory of
posterity.” Mr. Wilfrid Gibson’s tribute took the form of a short poem
called “The Going”:
Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, now perhaps the greatest of our younger poets
and a warm personal friend of Brooke’s, wrote at greater length:
“‘And the worst friend and enemy is but Death’ . . . ‘And if these poor
limbs die, safest of all.’ So ended two of the five sonnets, with the
common title ‘1914’, which Rupert Brooke wrote while he was in training,
between the Antwerp expedition and sailing for the Aegean. These sonnets
are incomparably the finest utterance of English poetry concerning the
Great War. We knew the splendid promise of Rupert Brooke’s earlier poetry;
these sonnets are the brief perfection of his achievement. They are much
more than that: they are among the few supreme utterances of English
patriotism. It was natural, perhaps, that they should leave all else that
has been written about the war so far behind. It is not so much that they
are the work of a talent scarcely, in its own way, to be equalled to-day;
it was much more that they were the work of a poet who had for his
material the feeling that he was giving up everything to fight for England
— the feeling, I think, that he was giving his life for England.
Reading these five sonnets now, it seems as if he had in them written his
own epitaph. I believe he thought so himself; a few words he said in my
last talk with him makes me believe that — now. At any rate, the
history of literature, so full of Fate’s exquisite ironies, has nothing
more poignantly ironic, and nothing at the same time more beautifully
appropriate, than the publication of Rupert Brooke’s noble
sonnet-sequence, ‘1914’, a few swift weeks before the death they had
imagined, and had already made lovely. Each one of these five sonnets
faces, in a quiet exultation, the thought of death, of death for England;
and understands, as seldom even English poetry has understood, the
unspeakable beauty of the thought:
I am strangely mistaken if the accent of the noblest English poetry does
not speak to us in those lines. And again:
“This — this music, this beauty, this courage — was Rupert
Brooke. But it is, we may be sure, his immortality. It is not yet
tolerable to speak of personal loss. The name seemed to stand for a
magical vitality that must be safe — safe! Yes, ‘and if these poor
limbs die, safest of all!’ What poetry has lost in him cannot be judged by
any one who has not read those last sonnets, now his farewell to England
and the world. I am not underrating the rest of his work. There was an
intellectual keenness and brightness in it, a fire of imagery and (in the
best sense) wit, the like of which had not been known, or known only in
snatches, in our literature since the best days of the later Elizabethans.
And it was all penetrated by a mastering passion, the most elemental of
all passions — the passion for life. ‘I have been so great a lover,’
he cries, and artfully leads us on to think he means the usual passion of
a young poet’s career. But it is just life he loves, and not in any
abstract sense, but all the infinite little familiar details of life
catalogued with delighted jest. This was profoundly sincere: no one ever
loved life more wholly or more minutely. And he celebrated his love
exquisitely, often unforgettably, through all his earlier poetry, getting
further intensity from a long sojourn in the South Seas. But this passion
for life had never had seriously to fight for its rights and joys. Like
all great lovers of life, he had pleased himself with the thought of death
and after death: not insincerely, by any means, but simply because this
gave a finer relish to the sense of being alive. Platonism, which offers
delightful games for such subtle wit as his, he especially liked to play
with. It was one more element in the life of here and now, the life of
mortal thought and sense and spirit, infinitely varying and by him
infinitely loved. And then came 1914; and his passion for life had
suddenly to face the thought of voluntary death. But there was no
struggle; for instantly the passion for life became one with the will to
die — and now it has become death itself. But first Rupert Brooke
had told the world once more how the passion for beautiful life may reach
its highest passion and most radiant beauty when it is the determination
to die.”
London, October, 1915.
Addendum
Comprised of poems written in his memory by three poets contemporary to
Rupert Brooke. A short poem by Mr. Gibson is already included in the
Biographical Note; a set of four of his sonnets is included here. The
poems are Public Domain.