Wilfred Gibson expressed it for us all; voiced the sorrow and the
hope in the death of Rupert Brooke, a victim of the Hun as well as that
other giant of art, the Rheims Cathedral; expressed it in these lines
written shortly after Rupert Brooke died:
"He's gone.
I do not understand.
I only know
That, as he turned to go
And waved his hand,
In his young eyes a sudden glory shone,
And I was dazzled by a sunset glow--
And he was gone,"
Thanks, Wilfred Gibson, you who have made articulate the voice of the
downtrodden of the world, the poetic "Fires" which have lighted up with
sudden glow the slums, the slag heaps, the factories, the coal mines,
and hidden common ways of folks who toil; thanks that you have also
beautifully lighted up the "End of the Trail" of your friend and our
friend, Poet Rupert Brooke; lighted it with the light that shines from
eternity. We owe you debt unpayable for that.
And you yourself, war-dead poet, you sang your end, full knowing that
it would come, as it did on foreign soil, far from the England that you
loved and voiced so wondrously. And now these lines that you wrote of
your own possible passing have new meaning for us who remain to mourn
your going:
"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England's breathing, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home."
The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
And so here, even in this hymn of your passing, you have given a
striking illustration off one of your strongest characteristics, love
of homeland. Poet of Youth who left us so early in life, take your
place along with Byron, and Shelley, and our own Seeger--a quartette of
immortals, whose voices were heard, but, like the horns of Elfland,
"faintly blowing" when they were hushed. Though you were but a
youthful voice, yet left you poetry worth listening to, and preached a
gospel that will make a better world, though it had not gone far enough
to save the world.