Walter De la Mare

“ Above all, Brooke's poems are charged with, and surrender the magic of what we call personality. They seem, as we read them, to bring us into a happy, instant relationship with him, not only ghostly eye to eye, but mind to mind. They tell more than even friendship could discover unaided. They share his secrets with the world—as if a boy had turned out the contents of his astonishing pockets just before going to bed. They share them, too, in that queer paradoxical fashion which makes a volume of poems a more secure refuge even than one's lawyer, one's doctor, or a priest. ”

“ Indeed it may be that, however uncompromising the usages of time, every poet, every man in whom burns on a few coals of imagination, "dies young." But no other English poet of his age has given up his life at a moment so signal, so pregnant. This has isolated and set Rupert Brooke apart. No single consciousness can even so much as vaguely realise the sacrifice of mind and hope and aspiration, of life and promise, "lovely and of good report," which this pitiless and abominable war has meant to England and to the world. ”

“ I mean imagination, the imagination that not merely invents, but that creates, and pierces to the inmost spirit and being of life, humanity and nature. This poetical imagination also is of two distinct kinds or types. The one divines, the other discovers. The one is intuitive, inductive; the other logical, deductive. The one visionary, the other intellectual. The one knows that beauty is truth, the other proves that truth is beauty. And the poet inherits, as it seems to me, the one kind from the child in him, the other from the boy in him. ”

“ Indeed the good things simply softly shimmered out of him—wit, enthusiasm, ideas, raillery, fun, and that sympathetic imagination concerning everybody and everything that he himself said was the artist's one duty. He had, of course, his own terms—critical, and perhaps at times a little exacting. If he suffered a fool, no more than with the rest of his own generation was it with a guileless gladness. He preferred humanity to be not too stiff, not too stupid, and not too dry. ”

“ Here in laughing, talking actuality was a living witness of what humanity might arrive at when—well, when we tread the streets of Utopia. Happiness is catching. No doubt this admiration sometimes elated him, without his being aware of it. At times, in certain company, it must have been a positive vexation. Admiration is a dense medium though which to press to what treasure may be beyond. Poets, indeed, unlike children, and for their own sake if not for that of others, should be heard and not seen; and it must have been very difficult for this poet to take cover, to lie low. ”

“ Nothing pleases him so much as doing things, though, fretted that body and mind so soon weary, he may pine for sleep. His writing, whether in his poems, his "Webster," or in his letters, is itself a kind of action; and he delights far more than the mystics in things touched, smelt and tasted. He delights, that is, in things in themselves not merely for their beauty or for the unseen reality they represent. He is restless, enquiring, veers in the wind like a golden weathercock. He is impatient of a vague idealism, as wary as a fox of the faintest sniff of sentimentality. ”

“ Lucretius, Donne, Dryden, Byron, Browning, Meredith, as representative of the other. Is not life both a dream and an awakening?
The visionaries, those whose eyes are fixed on the distance, on the beginning and end, rather than on the incident and excitement, of life's journey, have to learn to substantiate their imaginings, to base their fantastic palaces on terra firma, to weave their dreams into the fabric of actuality. But the source and origin of their poetry is in the world within. The intellectual imagination, on the other hand, flourishes on knowledge and experience. ”

“ In age not only must she have lost her now immortal fairness, but possibly she became repulsive. Well, then, as a poet, hating "sugared lies," he said so.
It is indeed characteristic of the intellectual imagination to insist on 'life's little ironies.' It destroys in order to rebuild. Every scientist, who is not a mere accumulator of facts, possesses it. Acutely sensitive to the imperfections of the present, its hope is in the future; whereas the visionary, certainly no less conscious of flaw and evil, is happy in his faith in the past, or rather in the eternal now. ”

“ Will it satisfy "serious" inquirers if it be suggested that these poems of Brooke's are manifestations of the intellectual imagination? Probably not. They demand of a poet a definite and explicit philosophy. They desire of him a confirmation, if not of their own faith, then of his. But it cannot be too clearly recognised that the faith of a poet is expressed in all that he writes. He cannot, either as a man or as a poet, live without faith; and never does. A few lovely words about lovely things is an expression of faith: so, too, is all love, all desire for truth, all happiness. ”

“ Gradually the childish self retires like a shocked snail into its shell. Like a hermit crab it accumulates defensive and aggressive disguises. Consciousness from being chiefly subjective becomes largely objective. The steam-engine routs Faërie. Actuality breaks in upon dream. School rounds off the glistening angles. The individual is swamped awhile by the collective. Yet the child-mind, the child-imagination persists, and if powerful, never perishes. ”

“ It feeds and feeds upon ideas, but because it is creative, it expresses them in the terms of humanity, of the senses and the emotions, makes life of them, that is. There is less mystery, less magic in its poetry. It does not demand of its reader so profound or so complete a surrender. But if any youthfulness is left in us, we can share its courage, enthusiasm and energy, its zest and enterprise, its penetrating thought, its wit, fervour, passion, and we should not find it impossible to sympathise with its wild revulsions of faith and feeling, its creative scepticism. ”

“ Though "magic" in the accepted sense is all but absent from his verse—the magic that transports the imagination clean into another reality, that drenches a word, a phrase, with the light that was never strangely cast even on the Spice Islands or Cathay, he has that other poetic magic that can in a line or two present a portrait, a philosophy, and fill the instant with a changeless grace and truth. ”

“ We don't often meet people in this world who instantly recall the Golden Age and remind us that the Greek sculptors went to Life for their models. Even Henry James, in his essay on Brooke, not less in its translucency than five fathoms deep, seems to pause Prospero-like before that Ariel whom he had suddenly encountered in the beautiful setting of the Cambridge "backs." With the lingering gusto which an epicure lavishes on a rare old vintage he tastes—tastes again, and all but hesitates for words to express his precise and ultimate reaction ”

“ His one desire is to tell each salient moment's truth about it. Truth at all costs: let beauty take care of itself. So he came to write and to defend poems that in Mr Marsh's witty phrase one finds it disquieting to read at meals. A child, a visionary, lives in eternity; a man in time, a boy—sheer youthfulness—in the moment. It is the moments that flower for Brooke. ”

“ But then, again, since nothing in life could satisfy such a hunger and aspiration for life, beyond mood and change he longed for a peace "where sense is with knowing one": and, beyond even this bodiless communion, for the peace that passes understanding:
Lost into God, as lights in light, we fly,
Grown one with will.
Simply because things as they are are not as they should be, we take refuge at times from the defeats and despairs of this mortal existence in satire and scepticism, a passing doubt in man, in goodness, in the heavenly power. ”

“ If he had lived to be, let us say, forty, he would have said just the same thing, though, perhaps, with more emphasis and more philosophy. He was never to experience that passing misfortune. He flung himself into the world—of men or of books, of thought and affairs—as a wasp pounces into a cakeshop, Hotspur into the fighting. ”

“ On the other is the poet who carries with him the salient characteristics of boyhood (though modified by the experiences and activities of his childhood) . This is little more than a theory, hut it may be worth a passing scrutiny.
What are the salient characteristics of childhood? Children, it will be agreed, live in a world peculiarly their own, so much so that it is doubtful if the adult can do more than very fleetingly reoccupy that far-away consciousness. There is, however, no doubt that the world of the grown-up is to children an inexhaustible astonishment and despair. They brood on us. ”

“ In the lugubrious and exciting moment when Brooke wrote "Kindliness" and "Menelaus and Helen," it was not his aim or thought to see that age, no less than youth and beauty is, in his own phrase, 'pitiful with mortality.' He resented ugliness and decay, and associated them with death and evil. For death, whatever else it may be, brings destruction of the beauty of the body; and evil brings the destruction of the spirit which is the life and light of the body. They are the contraries of a true living energy ”

“ If we have such faith ourselves, if we search close enough, we shall find a poet's faith expressed implicitly throughout his work.
We must, too, be thankful for many and various mercies, the mercy, for instance (so richly conferred in Brooke's writing) that here was a man who never spared mind and spirit in the effort to do the best work he could, who was that finest thing any man can be—a true craftsman delighting in his job. We cannot demand that a poet shall answer each of our riddles in turn; "tidy things up." He shares our doubts and problems ”

“ Johnson replied, "I am not obliged to do any more. No man is obliged to do as much as he can do. A man is to have part of his life to himself." "But I wonder, sir," Boswell continued, "you have not more pleasure in writing than in not writing." ”

“ Cousins cannot invariably see eye to eye. But we cannot forget that generous sympathy in the hour when England needed it. Our steady insight and understanding, with as slight an admixture as possible of a peculiar quality of insularity which may be comprehensively described as "God-Almightiness," is the least we can give in return.
I hope it will be no breach of confidence if I quote a few words from a letter I received from a friend in America only the other day, one who knew Brooke's poetry not by hearsay, but by heart. ”

“ Many of our fellow-creatures—whether we like or dislike them, approve or disapprove—always remain a little mysterious and problematical. Even when they most frankly express themselves, we are conscious that there is still something in them that eludes us, a dream unshared, a reticence unbroken, a fugitive phantom. ”

“ He tells how the day has brought back to him "that tearing hunger to do and do and do things. I want to walk 1000 miles, and write 1000 plays, and sing 1000 poems, and drink 1000 pots of beer, and kiss 1000 girls, and—oh, a million things!... The spring makes me almost ill with excitement. I go round corners on the roads shivering and nearly crying with suspense, as one did as a child, fearing some playmate in waiting to jump out and frighten one...." ”

“ However dogmatic, overbearing and partisan he might be, not only in what he is recorded to have said is there always something substantive and four-square, but frequently even a light and occasional utterance of his will stand like a signpost at the cross-roads positively imploring the traveller to make further exploration.
"The lad does not care for the child's rattle." Here, surely, is one of those signposts, one more enticing invitation to explore. By rattle, obviously, Johnson meant not only things childish, but things childlike. For such things the 'lad' does not merely cease to care. ”

“ It is here that the boyish type of mind and imagination, the intellectual analytical type begins to show itself, and to flourish. The boy—I merely refer, if I may be forgiven, to Boy, and far more tentatively to Girl, in the abstract, though, of course, there is no such entity—the boy is happy in company. ”

“ One promise, however, would never have failed him: "There are only three good things in this world: one is to read, one is to write, the other is to live poetry." The last is by far the most difficult, and Mrs Grundy is not uncharmed to discover that not all the poets are masters of the art. ”

“ With such metaphysical riddles as these—riddles which no philosopher has yet answered to anybody's but his own entire satisfaction—children entertain the waking moments of their inward reverie. They are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence into a waking vision. ”

“ The instant that love is dead, he has, to put it crudely, very little use for its corpse. He refuses point blank to find happiness in any happy medium, to be a wanderer, as he said, in "the middle mist." ”

“ Surroundings and education may mould and modify, but the inward bent of each one of us is persistent. Can we not, indeed, divide "grown-ups" into two distinct categories; those in whom the child is most evident, and those resembling the boy? "Men are but children of a larger growth," says Dryden. And Praed makes fun of the sad fact: "Bearded men to-day appear just Eton boys grown heavy." ”

“ Never was a true friendship between two countries and nations of such vital importance as that between England and America to-day. Long before the American nation actually "came into" the war, many, many hearts there beat truly with ours. ”