The way in is to pause and look again, look back
And ask what would it be without the photographs?
Bare-throated profile with the tumbled bright young hair,
Full face with shining eyes, and the rose-leaf and gold
Granted by our complaisance to the monochrome:
Well, thank the American that with both hands he took
And offered us ‘God’s vulgar lyric Rupert Brooke’,
The chance an Englishman with ‘good taste’ might have missed
And left us with no legend, or one so much the less
It would have less of truth.
For it is also true,
The legend, and not to be discarded even
If one should now re-model and re-write so much.
Picture and legend will lose nothing, rather gain
In potency, when to the frail rustic-heroic
And sincerely unreal memorial bronze
Moulded, say, by Alfred Gilbert, the young lanky
Nakedness of the warrior without armour
We add the real nudity and harder truth
That do live on through death.
And if we are honest,
And if we have not misunderstood already,
And if we want to understand anything now,
We must take all there is, and see and weigh it all
If possible, like those who loved and outlived him
And hearing he was dead would feel unbearably
The thought ‘It had to be, just that’; like Henry James
Who bowed his head and wept and said ‘Of course, of course’.
There it is then, the first thing—being beautiful
As with a woman’s beauty, and yet masculine.
There it is first and last, both Ave and Vale
And no less inescapable because his friends
Were not pleased and demurred when others used the word,
And tried like Frances Cornford for alternatives,
Hoping to find some quality of heart or mind
That fitted like a key.
‘A generosity’
She called it, ‘the real reason’ why his charm of face
So took one, why it was ‘continual pleasure
To look at him each day, his radiant fairness,
Beauty of build, broad head and forehead with the hair
Flung back, the deep-set candid eyes, their steadiness
And clearness so entirely giving him …’
But giving,
Giving also as she could see, with the unique
Good luck of a physique to match his character,
‘A symbol of youth for all time’: the disservice
Of her poor phrase but rendering, for an irony,
The young live piercing question of What is it for?
What to do and why do it?
Without a word, yet
It was the question he took about, like breathing.
The young question of What is it for stays always
Young, but will be defined of course by time and place,
And in his case by the England of King Edward
The Peacemaker, of Imperial afternoon
And Liberal noonday.
‘Who will inherit England?’
The novelists and Shaw and Wells debated it,
And drafted symbols of a new faith or unfaith.
But the transparency in him, identity
Of mould and moral substance made it personal,
The question of what and why—articulated
By chance and circumstance peculiar to him
No doubt, like being a poet and having no money—
But deeply, darkly personal with a danger
That is written in the lucid eyes and tinge of dawn
Riding the rosy horses: a vertigo, a dread
Thrust on him by the burden of insistent beauty
And sharpened by the failure of inbred belief
To nausea and madness—a dread that body
And mind are one, and all youth seems and dreams is trapped by
The seen and unseen processes of appetite,
Birth, growth, decay, and death and dirt in all of them.
So we have the uglies of his verse, like Jealousy,
Old Age and Lust, when he sees flesh go stale and sour,
Dry, greasy and baggy, and fastens his disgust
On some young rival who prospers but will repel
(‘For he’ll be dirty, dirty’) in his middle age
Long-married to the girl: which brings the bitter cry
‘And you’ll be dirty too!’—but also the unsaid
Angry ‘And so will I’.
Not all his ‘honesty’,
And ingenuous daring and laughing wit elsewhere,
Can hide the crudity of fear and misery here,
Or its correlative in the unreal passion
That postures in Dust and Mummia—insanely cries
‘Helen’s the lips I press’ ‘I tangle Egypt’s hair’
‘Two Antonies are mirrored in your eyes!’—and fancies
His dead lover and himself as drifting particles
Haunting the sunset air with rapture, to instruct
A later passionless deluded pair (‘Poor fools’)
Who might think otherwise they knew what love could be.
No wonder in Dead Men’s Love the ‘damned successful poet’
Would feel the wind blow cold and ‘with a sick surprise
The emptiness of eyes’.
Feeling nothing and afraid
Of meaning nothing, he snatches roughly, fiercely
At passion or bitterness.
The soft bright surface
Will shudder with a fear of being ‘second-rate’,
Which is not far from a fear of growing older.
‘You go by bushes with dog-roses, through long grass,
Harebell and scabious in the wet cow-pasture,
And through it and beyond it all feel something, some-
thing not personal but a unity, a wholeness …’
But with so many clever people (too many,
Clever or not?) all young together, all talking
And all ‘advanced’?
Camping and walking over downs
Or the New Forest patchwork of pine, oak and heather;
Coming back year by year to Fordingbridge and Bank
And Bucklers Hard; looking out over Channel seas
From Dorset clifftops in the sweetness of wind-blown
Blue weather!
Young people took to life out-of-doors
Then, with an impulse like his own to strip and swim
Leaping and plunging in clear water, imaging
Their war on dingy old superstitions, trappings
And trammels.
And one year as an experiment
His mother would have batches of his friends to stay
In Somerset—some men, and Daphne, Brynhild, Gwen
Ka, Margery …
But Bryn quite blatantly prefers
Walking alone on Exmoor to the drawing-room
With the Ranee, and she finds all the girls so odd
In dress and conversation, and—after Maynard
Keynes—says evasively that she has never met
So many brilliant and conceited young men.
Sad
That his ‘inexplicable sparkling people’ had
So failed to please, her son made rueful fun of it;
But remained sure his lot were right in their new-found-
out certainties and uncertainties, and to wear
Lightly or cast off the dead hand of ‘those grotesque
Encumbrances called parents’—right to undermine
Their obtuse and shabby world.
And if Beatrice Webb
At her Summer School in Wales thought they were shallow,
Those Cambridge Fabians, and quite unteachable,
And Rupert one of the worst, one can well believe
She disapproved of just what gives it colour now—
Their politics flushed with the young easy romance
And fun, and the emblem their camping and campaigning.
Clearly it was Rupert’s emblem, when with Dudley Ward
And Dalton he went lecturing in village halls
On the Poor Law and the Minority Report,
Or gave out Fabian pamphlets from a caravan
In Hampshire, calling on Edward Thomas at Steep:
But also arranging that, secretly, to be
Near Bedales and able to meet Noel Olivier.
We cannot disinter the girls of nineteen-eight
Or nine, ten and eleven, from the faded layers
Of verse, dead leaf on leaf; but Noel was last and chief,
And gleams out impassively as in the glimpses
Which were all he had that year.
What she then gave him
Was a long bitterness that grew to find her kept
So out of reach.
(As later she would keep herself
With Rupert’s letters, and I think that fortunate:
It lives without her—with her there would have been far,
Far too much …)
There was after all fatality
In the camp-circle of friends and his shining unease.
They say that Noel had clear hard grey eyes that looked
As if she thought him visionary and absurd,
But would be tolerant of that extravagance.
What could be less like Ka Cox offering her kind
Plain vulnerable face and slow ‘instinctive’ mind—
Or no mind, as one might in the end conjecture?
He had come closer to her lately, closer, both
To talk of wanting Noel and yes, drawn by her too.
For Ka had always been deep in confidences,
Always ready for a ‘heart-to-heart’, and needed
Always when she had lost a friend, another friend
So back from Munich in the summer of nineteen-
eleven, he feels a need of her at Grantchester.
Jacques and Gwen Raverat, who are now married, have called
And left him ‘drooping in front of the Old Vicarage,
Sentimental and jealous’, and most unwillingly
Alone:
‘And I have been so lofty for an hour,
So full of thoughts on Transience and Immanence
And the Larger Outlook, so—in a word, so like
You, Ka! … But come, and we’ll be intimate, intense
And guess, discover everything. Oh damn your aunts!
Shall I to London?’
And he adds a numbered list
Of ‘the best things in the world’, such as Lust, weather,
Keats, marrons glacés, Love and ‘guts’, ending with Ka
And Rupert, who can sign as Number Twenty-Nine.
And so tempting her, teasing her and charming her,
Making her laugh, as it were singing for his supper,
One thing, the young man’s one hunger, his greatest need
To play with, play for love; he will so far succeed
That she will come and stay two nights, quite properly
‘On Mrs Neave’s side of the house’.
But in a week
He writes in mock disdain of two Oliviers
‘How good one is—we, I mean, are!’ and jeers in rhyme
‘Awful. How will it end? they gibber night and day,
The Quite Advanced. They impudently ache for us.
Will Ka and Rupert marry? Let us pray …’
He sees
River and meadowsweet and chestnut-trees, the house
Muffled in clematis, the following summer,
But sitting at a café table in Berlin:
And by that time could tell ‘all the secrets of Hell’
Seriously, that he had dangled laughingly
As bait to fetch the hesitating Ka when he
Had been drawn to her; and he had learnt them through her.
To begin with he was undoubtedly in love
And she was not—as then (it reads like a bad play)
She was and he was not.
A terror suddenly
At Lulworth that December, and his near collapse;
Her panic and promise and their waiting to meet;
Verona, Munich, Starnberg …
Some things we cannot know
And could not show, and some actors need not be called,
Like Lytton Strachey and Ka’s ambidextrous painter.
What had gripped him we know, for all his irony—
His hunger and thirst for a proud thoroughgoing
And solemn-joyful passion; while one can guess that Ka
Could never do with less than two men whom she might
Half choose and half refuse, to keep her hesitant
And happy to be pressed and safely insecure.
It was indeed a breath, a glimpse of that in her
Which had unloosed in him a hell of jealousy:
The old dread of rejection, of being ‘second best’,
Of half-meaning or none; but with a worse, new fear,
That she was too kind and blind, too unsuspecting,
A child in danger.
But the same things, dim to both,
That so brought desperation and his plea to her
Would bring misery to both in full experience.
For how should he forgive, when he had found the wrong—
Even acknowledging that he himself did wrong,
As half in love with Noel?—that he was rescued
And soothed and strengthened by her body like a strong
Warm hand she gave for comfort (that she had thought would cost
So little, for so much); but that he then would find
His full gratitude and tenderness and trust befooled,
Scorched and smirched by the truth of her as wavering,
Vague, self-deceiving and deceived with the excuse
That ‘There’s no need for love’.
Yet now it was that Ka
Would in her turn, too late, give way, answer his pain
With pain, and cling. And he was sorry for her too,
Her complete inability to want or be
One thing, and all her life blurred and bewildered by
What he had made his hope—above all ‘honesty’,
And honesty precisely toward love and desire.
But he felt poisoned, suffocated, cauterised
And terrified to think he might be tied, and tied
Through being her opposite …
—But to have done with it,
Rather than run it through, every sore point, and peer
Like those who hovered at them out of Brunswick Square,
James, Virginia and Lytton: say, they hurried back,
Went to and fro, and ‘tugged and jerked’, would ‘try again
In May’, and so they came again to Germany.
But he is dead, dead, dead, and in the end will say,
Has courage and will tell her.
So in high summer
They met near Bibury, and talked while Justin waited
On the road in his Opel by the drowsy wood
And yellow wheatfield.
And we must wait outside too,
Until they come back to the car, the broken thing
Between them, and in silence they all drive away.
Two and a half years later the interpreter
Wrote in Greek with a pencil on the wooden cross
In Skyros
SERVANT OF GOD AND SUB-LIEUTENANT
IN THE ENGLISH NAVY.
Although the case is altered
From anything the man knew, or most others then,
The bare foreign words are like a lucky throw of dice,
Whatever meanings we withhold or attribute
To God, and may have faded or live on in England.
We cannot in reason think others will agree,
And but feel our way in half-light. But we follow him
In taking the pit and trap of that experience
As a kind of death, a death-bed.
Thus Der Guotaerë,
A gaunt-minded Old German poet, has a knight
Who lies in danger of death and sees a lady
Come to his bedside, dressed in gold and beautiful.
And she asks him with a smile ‘How do you like me?
You have served me all your life. My name is This-World.
Now I bring you your reward. Look!’
And she turns her back,
And he sees it is dark, fleshless, a hollow thing
Crawling with worms and beetles, and stinks like a dead dog.
‘Alas, why did I ever serve you?’ the knight cries.
Will that seem too antique and grim for such a modern,
One who even in the misery that came with Ka,
Half-choking in darkness and profounder terror
And outwardly there were the two more years of youth
Ranging and shining out more widely.
But the truth is
That was the way and sign of a new light in darkness.
For even if he had trapped himself, or rather
Because his deepest self like an avenging angel
Had rounded on him sword in hand, confronting him
With a joy in defiance: he had seen at last
That the division between what he seemed and dreamed
To have and be, and the dunghill reality,
Was life, hope, and the truth that he must live and be;
And everything stood still but meant another thing.
So the war, he admitted (he could never not see)
Might look like a way out.
But after sixty years
I find it the more moving that there was to be
No visible defeat, but death and victory.
How else, when the decision of that other war
Of self-betrayal and truth, in unfulfilment,
Without the plain rich payment down of a young death
Might seem too hard, narrowly like no victory
At all?