Rupert Brooke had the oldest pith of England in his fibre. He was born
of East Anglia, the original vein of English blood. Ruddy skin,
golden-brown hair, blue eyes, are the stamp of the Angles. Walsingham,
in Norfolk, was the home of the family. His father was a master at
Rugby; his grandfather a canon in the church.
In 1913 Heffer, the well-known bookseller and publisher of Cambridge,
England, issued a little anthology called _Cambridge Poems 1900-1913_.
This volume was my first introduction to Brooke. As an undergraduate at
Oxford during the years 1910-13 I had heard of his work from time to
time; but I think we youngsters at Oxford were too absorbed in our own
small versemakings to watch very carefully what the "Tabs" were doing.
His poem _The Old Vicarage, Grantchester_, reprinted in Heffer's
_Cambridge Poems_, first fell under my eye during the winter of 1913-14.
Grantchester is a tiny hamlet just outside Cambridge; set in the meadows
along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door to the
Trumpington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that Cambridge country
is flat and comparatively uninteresting; patchworked with chalky fields
bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting between pollard
willows; it is the beginning of the fen district, and from the brow of
the Royston downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a table-top
with the great chapel of King's clear against the sky. It is the
favourite lament of Cambridge men that their "_Umgebung_" is so dull and
monotonous compared with the rolling witchery of Oxfordshire.
But to the young Cantab sitting over his beer at the Café des Westens in
Berlin, the Cambridge villages seemed precious and fair indeed.
Balancing between genuine homesickness for the green pools of the Cam,
and a humorous whim in his rhymed comment on the outlying villages,
Brooke wrote the Grantchester poem; and probably when the fleeting pang
of nostalgia was over enjoyed the evening in Berlin hugely. But the
verses are more than of merely passing interest. To one who knows that
neighbourhood the picture is cannily vivid. To me it brings back with
painful intensity the white winding road from Cambridge to Royston which
I have bicycled hundreds of tunes. One sees the little inns along the
way--the _Waggon and Horses_, the _Plough_, the _King's Arms_--and the
recurring blue signboard _Fine Royston Ales_ (the Royston brewery being
famous in those parts). Behind the fun there shines Brooke's passionate
devotion to the soil and soul of England which was to reach its final
expression so tragically soon. And even behind this the immortal
questions of youth which have no country and no clime--
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
No lover of England, certainly no lover of Cambridge, is likely to
forget the Grantchester poem. But knowing Brooke only by that, one may
perhaps be excused for having merely ticketed him as one of the score of
young varsity poets whom Oxford and Cambridge had graduated in the past
decade and who are all doing fine and promising work. Even though he
tarried here in the United States ("El Cuspidorado," as he wittily
observed) and many hold precious the memory of his vivid mind and
flashing face, to most of us he was totally unknown. Then came the War;
he took part in the unsuccessful Antwerp Expedition; and while in
training for the Ægean campaign he wrote the five sonnets entitled
"1914". I do not know exactly when they were written or where first
published. Their great popularity began when the Dean of St. Paul's
quoted from them in a sermon on Easter Day, 1915, alluding to them as
the finest expression of the English spirit that the War had called
forth. They came to New York in the shape of clippings from the London
_Times_. No one could read the matchless sonnet:
"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England."
and not be thrilled to the quick. A country doctor in Ohio to whom I
sent a copy of the sonnet wrote "I cannot read it without tears." This
was poetry indeed; like the Scotchman and his house, we kent it by the
biggin o't. I suppose many another stranger must have done as I did:
wrote to Brooke to express gratitude for the perfect words. But he had
sailed for the Mediterranean long before. Presently came a letter from
London saying that he had died on the very day of my letter--April 23,
1915. He died on board the French hospital ship _Duguay-Trouin_, on
Shakespeare's birthday, in his 28th year. One gathers from the log of
the hospital-ship that the cause of his death was a malignant ulcer, due
to the sting of some venomous fly. He had been weakened by a previous
touch of sunstroke.
A description of the burial is given in "Memorials of Old Rugbeians Who
Fell in the Great War." It vividly recalls Stevenson's last journey to
the Samoan mountain top which Brooke himself had so recently visited.
The account was written by one of Brooke's comrades, who has since been
killed in action:
We found a most lovely place for his grave, about a mile up the
valley from the sea, an olive grove above a watercourse, dry now,
but torrential in winter. Two mountains flank it on either side, and
Mount Khokilas is at its head. We chose a place in the most lovely
grove I have ever seen, or imagined, a little glade of about a dozen
trees, carpeted with mauve-flowering sage. Over its head droops an
olive tree, and round it is a little space clear of all undergrowth.
About a quarter past nine the funeral party arrived and made their
way up the steep, narrow, and rocky path that leads to the grave.
The way was so rough and uncertain that we had to have men with
lamps every twenty yards to guide the bearers. He was borne by petty
officers of his own company, and so slowly did they go that it was
not till nearly eleven that they reached the grave.
We buried him by cloudy moonlight. He wore his uniform, and on the
coffin were his helmet, belt, and pistol (he had no sword). We lined
the grave with flowers and olive, and Colonel Quilter laid an olive
wreath on the coffin. The chaplain who saw him in the afternoon read
the service very simply. The firing party fired three volleys and
the bugles sounded the "Last Post."
And so we laid him to rest in that lovely valley, his head towards
those mountains that he would have loved to know, and his feet
towards the sea. He once said in chance talk that he would like to
be buried in a Greek island. He could have no lovelier one than
Skyros, and no quieter resting place.
On his grave we heaped great blocks of white marble; the men of his
company made a great wooden cross for his head, with his name upon
it, and his platoon put a smaller one at his feet. On the back of
the large cross our interpreter wrote in Greek.... "Here lies the
servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English navy, who died for the
deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks."
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. Professor Gilbert Murray
is quoted:
"Among all who have been poets and died young, it is hard to think of
one who, both in life and death, has so typified the ideal radiance of
youth and poetry."
In the grave among the olive trees on the island of Skyros, Brooke found
at least one Certainty--that of being "among the English poets." He
would probably be the last to ask a more high-sounding epitaph.
His "Collected Poems" as published consist of eighty-two pieces, fifty
of which were published in his first book, issued (in England only) in
1911. That is to say fifty of the poems were written before the age of
24, and seventeen of the fifty before 21. These last are thoroughly
youthful in formula. We all go through the old familiar cycle, and
Brooke did not take his youth at second hand. Socialism, vegetarianism,
bathing by moonlight in the Cam, sleeping out of doors, walking barefoot
on the crisp English turf, channel crossings and what not--it is all a
part of the grand game. We can only ask that the man really see what he
says he sees, and report it with what grace he can muster.
And so of the seventeen earliest poems there need not be fulsome praise.
Few of us are immortal poets by twenty-one. But even Brooke's
undergraduate verses refused to fall entirely into the usual grooves of
sophomore song. So unerring a critic as Professor Woodberry (his
introduction to the "Collected Poems" is so good that lesser hands may
well pause) finds in them "more of the intoxication of the god" than in
the later rounder work. They include the dreaming tenderness of _Day
That I Have Loved_; they include such neat little pictures of the gross
and sordid as the two poems _Wagner_ and _Dawn_, written on a trip in
Germany. (It is curious that the only note of exasperation in Brooke's
poems occurs when he writes from Germany. One finds it again, wittily
put, in _Grantchester_.)
This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here and
there in Brooke's work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible. Like all
young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy basis of our
humanity and found in it food for purging laughter. There was never a
young poet worth bread and salt who did not scrawl ribald verses in his
day; we may surmise that Brooke's peers at King's would recall many
vigorous stanzas that are not included in the volume at hand. The few
touches that we have in this vein show a masculine fear on Brooke's part
of being merely pretty in his verse. In his young thirst for reality he
did not boggle at coarse figures or loathsome metaphors. Just as his
poems of 1905-08 are of the cliché period where all lips are "scarlet,"
and lamps are "relumed," so the section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in
the _Shropshire Lad_ stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex images, and
yet developing into the dramatic felicity of his sonnet _The Hill_:
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass,
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old...." "And when we die
All's over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
--"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"
"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said:
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!" ... Proud we were
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
--And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
The true lover of poetry, it seems to me, cannot but wish that the
"1914" sonnets and the most perfect of the later poems had been
separately issued. The best of Brooke forms a thin sheaf of consummate
beauty, and I imagine that the little edition of "1914 and Other Poems,"
containing the thirty-two later poems, which was published in England
and issued in Garden City by Doubleday, Page & Company in July, 1915, to
save the American copy right, will always be more precious than the
complete edition. As there were only twenty-five copies of this first
American edition, it is extremely rare and will undoubtedly be sought
after by collectors. But for one who is interested to trace the growth
of Brooke's power, the steadying of his poetic orbit and the mounting
flame of his joy in life, the poems of 1908-11 are an instructive study.
From the perfected brutality of _Jealousy_ or _Menelaus and Helen_ or
_A Channel Passage_ (these bite like Meredith) we see him passing to
sonnets that taste of Shakespeare and foretell his utter mastery of the
form. What could better the wit and beauty of this song:
"Oh! Love," they said, "is King of Kings,
And Triumph is his crown.
Earth fades in flame before his wings,
And Sun and Moon bow down."
But that, I knew, would never do;
And Heaven is all too high.
So whenever I meet a Queen, I said,
I will not catch her eye.
"Oh! Love," they said, and "Love," they said,
"The Gift of Love is this;
A crown of thorns about thy head,
And vinegar to thy kiss!"--
But Tragedy is not for me;
And I'm content to be gay.
So whenever I spied a Tragic Lady,
I went another way.
And so I never feared to see
You wander down the street,
Or come across the fields to me
On ordinary feet.
For what they'd never told me of,
And what I never knew;
It was that all the time, my love,
Love would be merely you.
We come then to the five sonnets inspired by the War. Let us be sparing
of clumsy comment. They are the living heart of young England; the
throbbing soul of all that gracious manhood torn from its happy quest of
Beauty and Certainty, flung unheated into the absurdities of War, and
yet finding in this supreme sacrifice an answer to all its pangs of
doubt. All the hot yearnings of "1905-08" and "1908-11" are gone; here
is no Shropshire Lad enlisting for spite, but a joyous surrender to
England of all that she had given. See his favourite metaphor (that of
the swimmer) recur--what pictures it brings of "Parson's Pleasure" on
the Cher and the willowy bathing pool on the Cam. How one recalls those
white Greek bodies against the green!
Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping.
To those who tell us England is grown old and fat and soft, there is the
answer. It is no hymn of hate that England's youth has sung, but the
farewell of those who, loving life with infinite zest, have yet found in
surrendering it to her the Beauty, the Certainty, yes and the Quiet,
which they had sought. On those five pages are packed in simple words
all the love of life, the love of woman, the love of England that make
Brooke's memory sweet. Never did the sonnet speak to finer purpose. "In
his hands the thing became a trumpet"--