Rupert Brooke was born on 3 August 1887. His father was a housemaster at Rugby School, and Rupert and his two brothers grew up in the comfortable security of a home dedicated to the ideals of ‘godliness and good learning’. Having discovered the power of poetry – from a chance reading of Browning – at the age of nine, Rupert entered his father’s school in 1901. From the start he did well both in the classroom and on the playing field; for although early on he adopted the pose of the decadent aesthete, winning the school poetry prize in 1905, he found time to play in the cricket XI and the rugby XV.
Just under six feet tall, Brooke was strikingly handsome, with a mane of red-gold hair. People would turn in the street to watch him pass. His physical presence was matched by a sharpness of intellect, a charm and vitality of manner that affected everyone he met. Popular and successful at Rugby, he was even more so at King’s College, Cambridge, where he went as a scholar in 1906. He read more voraciously than ever; he threw himself into acting (playing the parts of Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and the Attendant Spirit in Milton’s Comus) and into the activities of the University Fabian Society, of which he became president. His circle of friends soon included Frances Cornford, E. M. Forster, Hugh Dalton, George Leigh Mallory, Geoffrey and Maynard Keynes, and Virginia Stephen (later to make her name as Virginia Woolf). When Henry James visited Cambridge in 1909, he too fell under the spell of the golden-haired young man who punted him down the Cam, although the pole was unfortunately allowed to fall on the Master’s bald head. Told that Rupert Brooke wrote poetry, but that it was no good, he replied: ‘Well, I must say I am relieved, for with that appearance if he had also talent it would be too unfair.’
Talent, however, there was. With this and his unswerving dedication to poetry, Brooke was soon producing poems in which a modern voice was making itself heard through the period diction:
(From the train between Bologna and Milan, second class)
Opposite me two Germans snore and sweat.
Through sullen swirling gloom we jolt and roar.
We have been here for ever: even yet
A dim watch tells two hours, two aeons, more.
The windows are tight-shut and slimy-wet
With a night’s fœtor. There are two hours more;
Two hours to dawn and Milan; two hours yet.
Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore. . .
Limbs that gleam and shadowy hair,
Or floating lazy, half-asleep.
Dive and double and follow after,
Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call,
With lips that fade, and human laughter,
And faces individual,
Well this side of Paradise! . . .
There’s little comfort in the wise.
It seems that, when Brooke left Tahiti, Taatamata may have been pregnant with his child (a girl who was to die in or about 1990). He knew nothing of this, and the question of her paternity was never resolved. Returning to England in June 1914, he was in a music-hall two months later when a scribbled message was thrown across the screen.
‘War declared with Austria. 11.9.’ There was a volley of quick low handclapping – more a signal of recognition than anything else. Then we dispersed into Trafalgar Square, and bought midnight war editions, special. All these days I have not been so near tears. There was such tragedy, and such dignity, in the people.
Brooke was commissioned into the Royal Naval Division (R. N. V. R.), and in mid-October 1914 took part in its brief and abortive expedition to Antwerp. This he described in a letter to Cathleen Nesbitt:
The sky was lit by burning villages and houses; and after a bit we got to the land by the river, where the Belgians had let all the petrol out of the tanks and fired it. Rivers and seas of flame leaping up hundreds of feet, crowned by black smoke that covered the entire heavens. It lit up houses wrecked by shells, dead horses, demolished railway stations, engines that had been taken up with their lines and signals, and all twisted round and pulled out, as a bad child spoils a toy. And there we joined the refugees, with all their goods on barrows and carts, in a double line, moving forwards about a hundred yards an hour, white and drawn and beyond emotion. The glare was like hell. We passed on, out of that, across a pontoon bridge, built on boats. Two German spies tried to blow it up while we were on it. They were caught and shot. We went on through the dark. The refugees and motor-buses and transport and Belgian troops grew thicker. After about a thousand years it was dawn.
Letter to Cathleen Nesbitt, 17 October 1914
On leave in December Brooke wrote the five ‘war sonnets’ that were to make him famous – ‘Peace’, ‘Safety’, two called ‘The Dead’, and ‘The Soldier’ (pp. 16–21) – and on 1 March 1915 embarked with the Hood Battalion on a troopship destined (though they did not know it) for Gallipoli. He wrote to Violet Asquith:
Do you think perhaps the fort on the Asiatic corner will want quelling, and we’ll land and come at it from behind and they’ll make a sortie and meet us on the plains of Troy? [. . . ]
Rupert Brooke (second row, second from left) in the Hood Battalion, 1914
I’ve never been quite so happy in my life, I think. Not quite so pervasively happy; like a stream flowing entirely to one end. I suddenly realize that the ambition of my life has been – since I was two – to go on a military expedition against Constantinople.
On the troopship, he and his friends read Homer to each other (in Greek) until, contracting first heatstroke, then dysentery, and finally blood-poisoning, Rupert Brooke died on 23 April. His friends buried him that evening under a Greek epitaph, on the island of Skyros, supposedly the childhood home of Achilles. In due course another friend, the poet Frances Cornford, was to speed the transition of the man into myth – man into marble – with her quatrain:
A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.
England at that time needed a focal point for its griefs, ideals and aspirations, and the Valediction that appeared in The Times over the initials of Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, sounded a note that was to swell over the months and years that followed:
The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable war sonnets which he has left behind will be shared by many thousands of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hardest, the cruellest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought. 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 that which is most freely proffered.
Brooke’s 1914 and Other Poems was published in June 1915 and over the next decade this volume and his Collected Poems sold 300,000 copies.
Brooke lies sick at Port Said, 2 April 1915
He has sometimes been criticized for not responding to the horrors of war, but it should be remembered that in 1914 Wilfred Owen was himself writing (in ‘The Women and the Slain’):
O meet it is and passing sweet
To live in peace with others,
But sweeter still and far more meet,
To die in war for brothers.
Brooke may have seen himself and others of his generation turning, at the outbreak of war, ‘as swimmers into cleanness leaping’, but he was not alone in envisioning an exhausted civilization rejuvenated by war. Isaac Rosenberg ended his poem ‘On Receiving News of the War’ (Cape Town, 1914):
O! ancient crimson curse!
Corrode, consume.
Give back this universe
Its pristine bloom.
Brooke’s original grave on the island of Skyros
Had Brooke lived to experience the Gallipoli landings or the trenches of the Western Front, it is hard to imagine that the poet of ‘Dawn’ (see pp. 11–12) would not have written as realistically as Owen and Rosenberg. Like them he is a soldier poet but, unlike them, he is not a war poet. He is a poet of peace, a celebrant of friendship, love and laughter.
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,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.
1914
Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest
He who has found our hid security,
Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest,
And heard our word, ‘Who is so safe as we?’
We have found safety with all things undying,
The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,
The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,
And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.
We have built a house that is not for Time’s throwing.
We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever.
War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,
Secretly armed against all death’s endeavour;
Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;
And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.
1914
Brooke writing in the garden of the Old Vicarage, Granchester
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.
1914
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.
There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter
And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,
Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night.
1914
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.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England
given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
1914
