Rupert Brooke

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 watched them so intently from afar. ”

“ They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself. Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, 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."
. . . . . .
"Coming from Alexandria yesterday," Denis Browne wrote to me on June 2nd, two days before his own death, "we passed Rupert's island at sunset. The sea and sky in the East were grey and misty ”

“ Youth commonly feels high-spirited in an unconscious, instinctive fashion, like a kitten or a puppy; but Rupert Brooke was as self-consciously young as a decrepit pensioner is self-consciously old. He rejoiced in the strength of his youth, and rolled it as a sweet morsel under his tongue. He was so glad to be young, and to know every morning on rising from sleep that he was still young! His passionate love of beauty made him see in old age only ugliness ”

“ Yet there is a danger that this mind and character may be misinterpreted, even by those who contemplate the poet's memory with idolatry. There is some evidence of a Rupert Brooke legend in the process of formation, which deserves to be guarded against not less jealously than the R.L. Stevenson legend of a few years ago. We know that for some people gold and lilies are not properly honoured until they are gilded and painted. Rupert Brooke was far from being either a plaster saint or a vivid public witness. ”

“ Rupert had an extraordinary vitality at school, which showed itself in a glorious enthusiasm and an almost boisterous sense of fun—qualities that are only too rare in combination. Of his enthusiasm it is hard to speak; we knew less about it, although xvwe felt it. We knew much more of his glorious fooling—in his letters, in his inimitable and always kind burlesques of masters or boys, in his parodies of himself. He seemed almost always ready for laughter. It is often the small things that stand out most vividly in one's mind. ”

“ The next morning we sailed, and had no chance of revisiting his grave.
It is no mere flippancy to say that the War did much for Rupert Brooke. The boy who had written many hot, morbid, immature verses and a handful of perfect poetry, stands now by one swift translation in the golden cloudland of English letters. There will never, can never, be any laggard note in the praise of his work. And of a young poet dead one may say things that would be too fulsome for life. ”

“ But those who knew him chiefly as a poet of the rarest gifts, the brightest genius, know that the loss is not only yours and ours, but the world's. And beyond his genius there was that infinitely lovable soul, that stainless heart whose earthly death can only be the beginning of a true immortality.
"To his friends Rupert stood for something so much purer, greater, and nobler than ordinary men that his loss seems more explicable than theirs. He has gone to where he came from; but if anyone left the world richer by passing through it, it was he." ”

“ And only to one whose quick and warm humanity [Pg 46] held life's common things so dear could the vision shine out of such a homely scene. But therein Rupert Brooke shows so clearly as the poet of his day: that through the familiar joys of comradeship and laughter: through the simple concrete things of a material world—the "pouring tea and cup and cloth," Reality gleams eternal.
When you were there, and you, and you,
Happiness crowned the night; I too,
Laughing and looking, one of all,
I watched the quivering lamplight fall
..... ”

“ Saw Arthur Asquith and Rupert Brooke of the Howe Battalion, both sick, neither bad. Asked Brooke to join my personal Staff, not as a fire insurance (seeing what happened to Ronnie Brooke at Elandslaagte and to Ava at Waggon Hill) but still as enabling me to keep an eye on the most distinguished of the Georgians. Young Brooke replied, as a preux chevalier would naturally reply,—he realised the privileges he was foregoing, but he felt bound to do the landing shoulder-to-shoulder with his comrades. ”

“ I hobnob vaguely with them over the promising verses of a young poet, called Rupert Brooke, who died in 1908. But I'm so much more concerned with the living; who doesn't interest them. God! it's so cheering to find someone who likes the modern stuff, and appreciates what one's at. You can't think how lxviiyour remarks and liking thrilled me. You seemed, both in your classing them and when you got to details, to agree so closely with what I felt about them (only, of course, I often feel doubtful about their relative value to other poetry) that I knew you understood what they meant. ”

“ Aside from McCrae’s In Flanders Fields the most celebrated commemorative war poem by a Canadian is Dr. J. B. Dollard’s sonnet to the memory of Rupert Brooke—a sonnet in which, as English and American critics observed, Dr. Dollard made beautiful use of the supposed cause of Brooke’s death (sunstroke, ‘arrows of Apollo’) and the place of burial in the Aegean. Brooke’s grave is on the island of Scyros, not Lemnos. But the error in fact only enhances the beauty of the poem:—
Slain by the arrows of Apollo, lo! ”

“ 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. ”

“ A similar effect of brightness in life and afterglow in death, seems to have been made on every one who knew him by Rupert Brooke. No young poet of the twentieth century has left such a flaming glory as he. ”

“ To those of us who see in poetry the perfect flowering of life, the story of Rupert Brooke will always mean chiefly the score or so of poems in which he reached to the full maturity of his genius and gave imperishable expression to the very heart of his personality.... ”

“ Rupert Brooke's verse had a conscious elegance that diverse judges attribute either to his treasuring a meagre vein or to a wary nature's perception that there had only yet been time to polish one of its many facets. In Robert Nichols' work variety and abundance are more evident than artistry and selectness. ”

“ Was it only an accident that the popularity of current poetry died just as cameras came into existence? How many a potential admirer has been lost by a glance at the frontispiece in a book of verse! In recent years, faith in soul-made beauty seems again to have shown itself justified. Likenesses of Rupert Brooke, with his "angel air," [Footnote: See W. W. Gibson, Rupert Brooke.] of Alan Seeger, and of Joyce Kilmer in his undergraduate days, are perhaps as beautiful as any the romantic period could afford. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A young man in white flannels, a young man with curly golden hair and blue eyes and a profile that resembled somewhat Sherril Schell's photograph of Rupert Brooke, a young man with slender, graceful hands which he was inclined to wave rather excessively in punctuation of his verbal effects, reclined on a divan upholstered with green taffeta, smoking a cigarette in a jade holder of a green so dark and so nearly translucent that it paraphrased emerald. ”

“ 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 ”

“ There's nothing worth the wear of winning,
⁠But laughter and the love of friends.
How much Rupert loved Rugby while he was there, I know; and I know too how much those who knew him there loved him."
The letters which he wrote in his last year at school are radiant. "I am enjoying everything immensely at present. To be among 500 people, all young and laughing, is intensely delightful and {{xviinteresting. . . . [3] I am seated on the topmost pinnacle of the Temple of Joy. Wonderful things are happening all around me. ”

“ But Lamb, pretending to be Elizabethan, dealt with the larger splendours, whereas Rupert Brooke's modernity took count of the smaller. John Woodvil's list of his loves begins with the sunrise and the sunset; Rupert Brooke sets down such mundane and domestic trifles as white plates and cups, the hard crust of bread, and the roughness of blankets. [Pg 149]
This, to strangers to the poem, may not sound very poetical, but they must read it before they judge. To me it is at once one of the most satisfying and most beautiful leaves in the Georgian anthology. Here is a passage:
Holes in the ground ”

“ It was not indeed under the flag of that research that he offered himself for the Army almost immediately after his return to England—and even if when a young man was so essentially a poet we need see no act in him as a prosaic alternative. The misfortune of this set of letters from New York and Boston, from Canada and Samoa, addressed, for the most part, to a friendly London evening journal is, alas, in the fact that they are of so moderate a quantity; for we make him out as steadily more vivid and delightful while his opportunity grows. ”

“ The way in which things actually turned out shows one of the most delightful sides of Rupert. He was in all things more than loyal to his father, but he never made it awkward for the rest of us. His sense of fun saw him through, and it helped us a good deal to know that he would not misinterpret all the little pleasantries that boys make at the expense of their Housemaster. The result was a sort of union between the Housemaster and the House, which made very much for good. ”

“ Let an inn parlour lie behind red curtains, and a table be drawn toward the fire. Let there be a loin of cold beef, an elbow of yellow cheese, a tankard of dog's nose. Then may we prop our Bacon's Essays against the pewter and study those mellow words: "Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth." Haec studio, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur.
RUPERT BROOKE
Rupert Brooke had the oldest pith of England in his fibre. ”

“ There was a general feeling among the younger poets that modern English poetry was very good, and sadly neglected by readers. Rupert announced one evening, sitting half-undressed on his bed, that he had conceived a brilliant scheme. He would write a book of poetry, and publish it as a selection from the works of twelve different writers, six men and six women, all with the most convincing pseudonyms. ”

“ 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. ”