1915 ‘Their name liveth for evermore’ say the monuments to the fallen of the First World War. None more so than the name of Rupert Brooke. When war broke out in August 1914, Brooke, at 27, had some reputation as a literary critic (principally for his work on Jacobean drama) and as a poet associated with the Bloomsbury Group – whose liberal-humanist values he shared.
His tepid pre-war Georgian literary style is exemplified in his second-best-known poem, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ (the current owner, Jeffrey Archer, is doubtless forever asked if there is ‘honey still for tea’).
Brooke was strikingly good-looking, bisexual and well-connected: a particular friend was Edward Marsh, one of the principal patrons of early 20th-century verse. It was through Marsh, via Winston Churchill (then first lord of the admiralty) that Brooke was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve on this day.
Brooke’s war sonnets, later published in the volume 1914: and Other Poems (and dashed off in December of that year) are most famous for the gallantly death-anticipating ‘The Soldier’:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever 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 English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
Brooke was, of course, a sailor. But the notion of corpses rotting at sea was not poetic. His vessel left port on 28 February 1915 for what would be a battle at Gallipoli (one of Churchill’s less happy strategic initiatives). En route, on a hospital ship on 23 April, Brooke died of a mosquito bite turned septic. His corpse was landed and summarily buried in a foreign field, at Kyros in Greece.
Brooke’s patriotic poems were too useful as propaganda not to be exploited on the home front. On Easter Sunday 1915 (22 March), Dean Inge read ‘The Soldier’ from the pulpit of St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘The enthusiasm of a pure and elevated patriotism has never found a nobler expression’, Inge added, by way of comment.
The poet was then still living but would shortly be dead.
Winston Churchill wrote his obituary in The Times, hailing him as ‘one of England’s noblest sons’.
1914: and Other Poems was published in May 1915, and reprinted, it is estimated, every two months during the course of the war as foreign fields overflowed with the rich dust of British troops.