2 Rupert Brooke (Essay, 1921)*1

I watched them; I admired them for a long time; barely flashing, they swam, swam tirelessly back and forth behind the glass barrier, in the haze of the still water, pale green, like slumber, like eternity, like the inner world of a blind man. They were huge, round, colorful: their porcelain scales seemed as if painted in bright colors by a meticulous Chinaman. I looked upon them as in a dream, spellbound by the mysterious music of their flowing, delicate movements. In between these gently shimmering giants darted multicolored fry—tiny specters, reminiscent of the softest butterflies, the most translucent dragonflies. And in the half-gloom of the aquarium, as I watched all these fantastical fish, gliding, breathing, staring wide-eyed into their pale-green eternity, I recalled the cool, meandering verses of the English poet who sensed in them, in these supple, iridescent fish, a profound symbol of our existence.

Rupert Brooke…This name is not yet known on the Continent, let alone in Russia. Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) is represented by two slim volumes, in which around eighty poems are collected. His work has a rare, captivating quality: a kind of radiant liquidity—not for nothing did he serve in the navy, not for nothing does his very name mean “brook” in English. This Tyutchev-like love for everything streaming, burbling, brightly chilled, is so strikingly, so convincingly expressed in most of his poems that you want not to read them, but, rather, to suck them up through a straw, to press them to your face like dewy flowers, to lower yourself into them as into the freshness of an azure lake. For Brooke, the world is a watery deep, “A fluctuant mutable world and dim, / Where wavering masses bulge and gape / Mysterious….The strange soft-handed depth subdues / Drowned colour there, but black to hues, / As death to living, decomposes— / Red darkness of the heart of roses, / Blue brilliant from dead starless skies, / And gold that lies behind the eyes, / The unknown unnameable sightless white / That is the essential flame of night, / Lustreless purple, hooded green, / The myriad hues that lie between / Darkness and darkness.”1 And all of these colors breathe and stir, producing those scaly creatures that we call fish; and thus, through his subtly eerie poems, the poet conveys all the tremble of their lives.

Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,

Dawdling away their wat’ry noon)

Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,

Each secret fishy hope or fear.

Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;

But is there anything Beyond?

This life cannot be All, they swear,

For how unpleasant, if it were!

One may not doubt that, somehow, Good

Shall come of Water and of Mud;

And, sure, the reverent eye must see

A Purpose in Liquidity.

We darkly know, by Faith we cry,

The future is not Wholly Dry.

Mud unto mud!—Death eddies near—

Not here the appointed End, not here!

But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,

Is wetter water, slimier slime!

And there (they trust) there swimmeth One

Who swam ere rivers were begun,

Immense, of fishy form and mind,

Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;

And under that Almighty Fin,

The littlest fish may enter in.

Oh! never fly conceals a hook,

Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,

But more than mundane weeds are there,

And mud, celestially fair;

Fat caterpillars drift around,

And Paradisal grubs are found;

Unfading moths, immortal flies,

And the worm that never dies.

And in that Heaven of all their wish,

There shall be no more land, say fish.2

In this poem, in this trembling drop of water, the essence of all earthly religions is reflected. And Brooke is himself a “dreaming fish” when, cast on a tropical island, he promises his Hawaiian sweetheart the perfection of a land beyond the clouds: “There the Eternals are, and there / The Good, the Lovely, and the True, / And Types, whose earthly copies were / The foolish broken things we knew; / There is the Face, whose ghosts we are; / The real, the never-setting Star; / And the Flower, of which we love / Faint and fading shadows here; / Never a tear, but only Grief; / Dance, but not the limbs that move; / Songs in Song shall disappear; / Instead of lovers, Love shall be….”3 But then, suddenly coming to, the poet exclaims: “How shall we wind these wreaths of ours, / Where there are neither heads nor flowers? / Oh, Heaven’s Heaven!—but we’ll be missing / The palms, and sunlight, and the south; / And there’s an end, I think, of kissing, / When our mouths are one with Mouth…./ Hear the calling of the moon, / And the whispering scents that stray / About the idle warm lagoon. / Hasten, hand in human hand, / Down the dark, the flowered way, / Along the whiteness of the sand, / And in the water’s soft caress, / Wash the mind of foolishness, / Mamua, until the day. / Spend the glittering moonlight there / Pursuing down the soundless deep / 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….”

No other poet has so often, and with such heartrending and artistic acuity, looked into the twilight of the beyond. In trying to imagine it, he moves from one conception to the next with the fevered haste of a man looking for matches in a darkened room while someone knocks menacingly at his door. One minute it seems to him that, having died, he will wake up on a “long livid oozing plain / Closed down by the strange eyeless heavens” and see himself as “An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck / Of moveless horror; an Immortal One / Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly / Fast-stuck in grey sweat on a corpse’s neck,”4 while in the next he foresees infinite bliss. That presentiment pulsates most ardently in his poem “Dust.”

Here it is in its Russian translation:

Kogda, pogasnuv, kak zarnitsy,

uydya ot dal’ney krasoty,

vo mgle, v nochi svoey otdel’noy,

istleyu ya, istleesh’ ty….^*2

When the white flame in us is gone,

And we that lost the world’s delight

Stiffen in darkness, left alone

To crumble in our separate night;

When your swift hair is quiet in death,

And through the lips corruption thrust

Has stilled the labour of my breath—

When we are dust, when we are dust!—

Not dead, not undesirous yet,

Still sentient, still unsatisfied,

We’ll ride the air, and shine, and flit,

Around the places where we died,

And dance as dust before the sun,

And light of foot, and unconfined,

Hurry from road to road, and run

About the errands of the wind.

And every mote, on earth or air,

Will speed and gleam, down later days,

And like a secret pilgrim fare

By eager and invisible ways,

Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,

Till, beyond thinking, out of view,

One mote of all the dust that’s I

Shall meet one atom that was you.

Then in some garden hushed from wind,

Warm in a sunset’s afterglow,

The lovers in the flowers will find

A sweet and strange unquiet grow

Upon the peace; and, past desiring,

So high a beauty in the air,

And such a light, and such a quiring,

And such a radiant ecstasy there,

They’ll know not if it’s fire, or dew,

Or out of earth, or in the height,

Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue,

Or two that pass, in light, to light,

Out of the garden, higher, higher….

But in that instant they shall learn

The shattering ecstasy of our fire,

And the weak passionless hearts will burn

And faint in that amazing glow,

Until the darkness close above;

And they will know—poor fools, they’ll know!—

One moment, what it is to love.5

Between these two extremes unwinds a string of more tranquil images. Here, on the banks of Lethe, among mythic cypresses, the poet encounters his dead mistress, and she, this carefree Laura, “toss[es her] brown delightful head,”6 so amused is she by the sight of the dead ancients—a snub-nosed Socrates, a puny Caesar, an envious Petrarch.

Or else, having run up a blossoming hill, somewhere near Cambridge, Rupert, cheerfully panting, exclaims that his soul will be resurrected in the kisses of future lovers. At other times the clouds caress his imagination:

Down the blue night the unending columns press

In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow,

Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow

Up to the white moon’s hidden loveliness.

Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless,

And turn with profound gesture vague and slow,

As who would pray good for the world, but know

Their benediction empty as they bless.

They say that the Dead die not, but remain

Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth.

I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these,

In wise majestic melancholy train,

And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas,

And men, coming and going on the earth.7

This isn’t far from a complete reconciliation with death, and indeed the fourteenth year of our century inspired Brooke to write five colorful sonnets, lit up, as if from within, by a wonderful humility:

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.8

Here’s another sonnet from the same series. Its rough copy is on display beneath glass in the British Museum, between a Dickens manuscript and Captain Scott’s diary:

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.9

In these examples I wanted to show the diversity of those colored panes of glass through which, flitting from one to another, Brooke gazes into the distance, trying to discern the features of approaching death. It seems to me he is so persistently troubled not so much by the thought of what he will find there, as by the thought of what he will leave behind here. He loves the earth passionately. For him, earthly life is like first love, and even though he senses that other love affairs will follow, nothing for him will be able to replace the splashes of sun, the howls of the wind, the pricking of the rain, the glittering majesty and glittering agony of that first love—not the cold kisses of the heavenly stars, or the sadistic caresses of snoutless death, or the serenades of angels, or spectral beauties wandering over Lethe. The same idea glimmers in a short, very subtle poem about the Virgin Mary: the Archangel Gabriel disappears like a golden speck into the sky; Mary, for the first time, feels within Her body the beating of a second heart, a divine beating, separating Her from the world, illuminating Her with a celestial light, but…“The air was colder, and grey….”10 In that moment She has, most likely, understood that Her earthly life is over, that never again will She play or sing or pet little white goats, among the crocuses, under the olive trees.

I repeat: Rupert Brooke loves the world, and its lakes and waterfalls, with a passionate, penetrating, head-spinning love. He would like to smuggle it with him beneath his coattails at the hour of his death, and later, somewhere in some limit beyond the sun, to examine it in his idle hours, to palpate this imperishable treasure endlessly. Yet he knows that even if he finds an inexpressibly beautiful paradise, he will still be leaving behind his damp, living, brilliant earth forever. Sensing the end is nigh, he writes an inspired testament—he counts up his riches and hurriedly compiles a muddled list of all that he has loved on earth. And there is a lot he has loved: “White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, / Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; / Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust / Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food; / Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood; / And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers; / And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours, / Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon; / Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon / Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss / Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is / Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen / Unpassioned beauty of a great machine; / The benison of hot water; furs to touch; / The good smell of old clothes; and other such—/ The comfortable smell of friendly fingers, / Hair’s fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers / About dead leaves and last year’s ferns; […] / Sweet water’s dimpling laugh from tap or spring; / Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing; / Voices in laughter, too; and body’s pain, / Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train; / Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam / That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home; / And washen stones, gay for an hour; […] / Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew; / And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new; / And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass…”11

And here Brooke finds momentary solace in the thought of glory: “My night,” he says, “shall be remembered for a star / That outshone all the suns of all men’s days. / Shall I not crown them with immortal praise / Whom I have loved, who have given me, dared with me / High secrets, and in darkness knelt to see / The inenarrable godhead of delight?”12

And having once more forgotten that “The laugh dies with the lips, ‘Love’ with the lover,”13 the poet in his quivering iambs merges life and death into a single fervent rapture:

Out of the nothingness of sleep,

The slow dreams of Eternity,

There was a thunder on the deep:

I came, because you called to me.

I broke the Night’s primeval bars,

I dared the old abysmal curse,

And flashed through ranks of frightened stars

Suddenly on the universe!

The eternal silences were broken;

Hell became Heaven as I passed.—

What shall I give you as a token,

A sign that we have met, at last?

I’ll break and forge the stars anew,

Shatter the heavens with a song;

Immortal in my love for you,

Because I love you, very strong.

Your mouth shall mock the old and wise,

Your laugh shall fill the world with flame,

I’ll write upon the shrinking skies

The scarlet splendour of your name,

Till Heaven cracks, and Hell thereunder

Dies in her ultimate mad fire,

And darkness falls, with scornful thunder,

On dreams of men and men’s desire.

Then only in the empty spaces,

Death, walking very silently,

Shall fear the glory of our faces

Through all the dark infinity.

So, clothed about with perfect love,

The eternal end shall find us one,

Alone above the Night, above

The dust of the dead gods, alone.14

But for Brooke, woman does not always appear as the eternal companion, the guarantor of immortality. Just as in his poems dedicated to the “great Maybe,”15 Brooke in his depictions of women and of love is unstable, changeable, like the beam of a torch which lights in passing here a puddle, there a blooming bush. He shifts from the divine madness that inspired “Dust” and “The Call” to some kind of anguished sketches, drawing “unsatisfied / Sprawling desires…/ Fantastic shape to mazed fantastic shape, / Straggling, irregular, perplexed, embossed, / Grotesquely twined, extravagantly lost / By crescive paths and strange protuberant ways.”16

Brooke can just about reconcile himself to the “fantastical” human body when that body is young, headstrong, pure, but the poet recoils in anger and disgust from feeble old age, with its toothless, slobbering mouth, its red eyelids, its late lasciviousness….And the prehistoric device of juxtaposing spring and decay, dreams and reality, roses and thistles, is renewed by Brooke unusually subtly.

The following two sonnets can serve as an example:

Hot through Troy’s ruin Menelaus broke

To Priam’s palace, sword in hand, to sate

On that adulterous whore a ten years’ hate

And a king’s honour. Through red death, and smoke,

And cries, and then by quieter ways he strode,

Till the still innermost chamber fronted him.

He swung his sword, and crashed into the dim

Luxurious bower, flaming like a god.

High sat white Helen, lonely and serene.

He had not remembered that she was so fair,

And that her neck curved down in such a way;

And he felt tired. He flung the sword away,

And kissed her feet, and knelt before her there,

The perfect Knight before the perfect Queen.

So far the poet. How should he behold

That journey home, the long connubial years?

He does not tell you how white Helen bears

Child on legitimate child, becomes a scold,

Haggard with virtue. Menelaus bold

Waxed garrulous, and sacked a hundred Troys

’Twixt noon and supper. And her golden voice

Got shrill as he grew deafer. And both were old.

Often he wonders why on earth he went

Troyward, or why poor Paris ever came.

Oft she weeps, gummy-eyed and impotent;

Her dry shanks twitch at Paris’ mumbled name.

So Menelaus nagged; and Helen cried;

And Paris slept on by Scamander side.17

This disgust with decrepitude reveals itself even more strongly in the poem “Jealousy,” addressed, probably, to a young bride. In it, the poet is so carried away with his depiction of the future aging of the rosy, dashing husband, whom he already sees as bald, and fat, and dirty, and God knows what else, that only in the thirty-third—the final—line does he suddenly realize: “Oh, when that time comes, you’ll be dirty too!”18

It seems to me that both in this poem, and in that other one, dedicated to a remarkably detailed and rather disgusting examination of seasickness, whose manifestations are here directly compared to memories of love,19 Brooke slightly flaunts his ability to clasp and snatch up, like a spillikin, any image, any feeling; to slightly blacken the underside of love, just as he blackened (in his poem about the “fly / Fast-stuck in grey sweat on a corpse’s neck,” mentioned above) the view of a region beyond the grave. He knows perfectly well that death is only a surprise; he is the singer of eternal life, tenderness, woodland shades, clear streams, sweet smells; he ought not to compare the searing pain of parting to heartburn and belching.

After all Brooke was not happy in love. It is telling that he can imagine a completely cloudless blissfulness with a woman only by transporting both himself and her beyond the limit of earthly life. Loving infinitely the beauty of the world, he frequently feels that clumsy, disorderly passion disturbs with its prosaic tread earth’s chiaroscuro and soft sounds. He expresses the incursion of this goose’s prose into the garden of poetry in the following way:

Safe in the magic of my woods

I lay, and watched the dying light.

Faint in the pale high solitudes,

And washed with rain and veiled by night,

Silver and blue and green were showing.

And the dark woods grew darker still;

And birds were hushed; and peace was growing;

And quietness crept up the hill;

And no wind was blowing…

And I knew

That this was the hour of knowing,

And the night and the woods and you

Were one together, and I should find

Soon in the silence the hidden key

Of all that had hurt and puzzled me—

Why you were you, and the night was kind,

And the woods were part of the heart of me.

And there I waited breathlessly,

Alone; and slowly the holy three,

The three that I loved, together grew

One, in the hour of knowing,

Night, and the woods, and you——

And suddenly

There was an uproar in my woods,

The noise of a fool in mock distress,

Crashing and laughing and blindly going,

Of ignorant feet and a swishing dress,

And a Voice profaning the solitudes.

The spell was broken, the key denied me

And at length your flat clear voice beside me

Mouthed cheerful clear flat platitudes.

You came and quacked beside me in the wood.

You said, “The view from here is very good!”

You said, “It’s nice to be alone a bit!”

And, “How the days are drawing out!” you said.

You said, “The sunset’s pretty, isn’t it?

…………………………………….

By God! I wish—I wish that you were dead!20

Or else the poet complains that his beloved does not understand him: he asks her to be meek—she kisses him on the lips; he asks for earth-shattering ecstasies—she kisses him on the forehead. He himself confesses that he belongs to those who are “wanderers in the middle mist, / Who cry for shadows, clutch, and cannot tell / Whether they love at all, or, loving, whom: / An old song’s lady, a fool in fancy dress, / Or phantoms, or their own face on the gloom.”21 And one of these specters appears to him once:

I came back late and tired last night

Into my little room,

To the long chair and the firelight

And comfortable gloom.

But as I entered softly in

I saw a woman there,

The line of neck and cheek and chin,

The darkness of her hair,

The form of one I did not know

Sitting in my chair.

I stood a moment fierce and still,

Watching her neck and hair.

I made a step to her; and saw

That there was no one there.

It was some trick of the firelight

That made me see her there.

It was a chance of shade and light

And the cushion in the chair.

Oh, all you happy over the earth,

That night, how could I sleep?

I lay and watched the lonely gloom;

And watched the moonlight creep

From wall to basin, round the room.

All night I could not sleep.22

At other times, however, Brooke feels as though his own body hinders him from loving, and in beautiful lines he depicts that strange, sudden coldness which once made a Venetian woman feel so offended by bashful Rousseau.23 He could savour unbridled happiness, if only woman were a blossoming tree, a sparkling stream, a wind, a bird. But as soon as the person obscures the goddess in her, as soon as the shriek of a cheap violin disturbs the silence of the radiant night, Brooke suffers, is tormented, and curses this agonizing dissonance. And the effect of all his strivings, downfalls, disillusionments, and failures in love is a feeling, not just of a personal, but of a cosmic loneliness, though one which he feels only in the godforsaken hours of insomnia when the captivating visible world is shrouded in dusk.

The stars, a jolly company,

I envied, straying late and lonely;

And cried upon their revelry:

“O white companionship! You only

In love, in faith unbroken dwell,

Friends radiant and inseparable!”

Light-heart and glad they seemed to me

And merry comrades (even so

God out of Heaven may laugh to see

The happy crowds; and never know

That in his lone obscure distress

Each walketh in a wilderness).

But I, remembering, pitied well

And loved them, who, with lonely light,

In empty infinite spaces dwell,

Disconsolate. For, all the night,

I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,

Star to faint star, across the sky.24

We should remark, by the way, that Brooke likes to depict God with a beard, in a cloak, upon a golden throne (just as fish are represented as some kind of scaly, tailed Jupiter, swimming in the Heavenly Creek). But here’s what happened once:

Because God put His adamantine fate

Between my sullen heart and its desire,

I swore that I would burst the Iron Gate,

Rise up, and curse Him on His throne of fire.

Earth shuddered at my crown of blasphemy,

But Love was as a flame about my feet;

Proud up the Golden Stair I strode; and beat

Thrice on the Gate, and entered with a cry—

All the great courts were quiet in the sun,

And full of vacant echoes: moss had grown

Over the glassy pavement, and begun

To creep within the dusty council-halls.

An idle wind blew round an empty throne

And stirred the heavy curtains on the walls.25

The meaning of this sonnet is not entirely clear: has earthly love vanquished and overthrown God, or did the poet wish to express the thought that the external God of Sabaoth is inextricably linked with the God “within us,” and therefore disappears as soon as man begins to deny him, or is the meaning that God is simply dead and has long ceased ruling the world? Equally dark is the symbol in another poem, similar in spirit to the sonnet above:

Slowly up silent peaks, the white edge of the world,

Trod four archangels, clear against the unheeding sky,

Bearing, with quiet even steps, and great wings furled,

A little dingy coffin; where a child must lie,

It was so tiny. (Yet, you had fancied, God could never

Have bidden a child turn from the spring and the sunlight,

And shut him in that lonely shell, to drop for ever

Into the emptiness and silence, into the night….)

They then from the sheer summit cast, and watched it fall,

Through unknown glooms, that frail black coffin—and therein

God’s little pitiful Body lying, worn and thin,

And curled up like some crumpled, lonely flower-petal—

Till it was no more visible; then turned again

With sorrowful quiet faces downward to the plain.26

Both of these poems belong to the poet’s earliest works (they were written in 1906), and even though they are picturesque and majestic in themselves, they are scarcely distinctive of Brooke. He so keenly senses the divine in surrounding nature,—to what end, then, does he need this prop-room eternity, these Vrubelesque angels,27 this potentate with a cottonwool beard? Let fireflies believe in electrical beacons, dragonflies in the Antoinette monoplane, flowers in the gigantic Victoria regia,28 moles in a blind, velvety monster; let the good folk in some little provincial town snuffle, and mumble, and blow their noses into huge checkered handkerchiefs, as they crowd around the body of a dead girl, the fleeting lover of a wandering poet—“They will put pence on your grey eyes, / Bind up your fallen chin,” “and their thoughts will creep / Like flies on the cold flesh”…but “I,” says the poet, “I shall not hear your trentals, / Nor eat your arval bread”29—and from the stifling little white town he walks to the top of a hill, full of exultant recollections, and there, alone among the stars and the wind, he keeps her Ambarvalia.30 Now he is happy: his beloved has become one with the eternal, hundred-colored, hundred-sounding nature that he so fervently loves. But, then, even in his love of nature, Rupert Brooke is capriciously narrow, as are all poets of all times.

Kipling writes somewhere: “God gave all men all earth to love, / But, since our hearts are small, / Ordained for each one spot should prove / Beloved over all.”31 So Pushkin loved “two rowans before a small isba,”32 and Lermontov “twin birches gleaming white.”33 And Rupert Brooke, in talking of his love for the earth, secretly has only England in mind, and not even all of England, but only the little town of Grantchester, a magical little town. Sitting in Berlin’s Café des Westens on a stifling summer’s day, Brooke rapturously recalls that hazily green, that shadily cool river flowing past Grantchester.34 And he speaks of it with exactly the same expressions he used to speak of a fragrant Hawaiian lagoon, for that lagoon was in essence the very same dear, narrow little river, bordered by willows and hedges, whence here and there “an English unofficial rose” peers out. In a sequence of untranslatable, burbling lines, he forces a hundred spectral Vicars to dance on the fields in the moonlight; fawns furtively peep through the greenery; a Naiad swims up, her head crowned in reeds; Pan quietly pipes. With deep tenderness the poet sings praise to his little fairy-tale town, inhabited by people clean in body and soul, and so wise, so refined, that they shoot themselves as soon as dull old age approaches….

I once rode through Grantchester on my bicycle. The fences, the complicated iron gates, the barbed wire in the surrounding fields all tormented the eye. The dirty little brick houses all reeked of resigned boredom. A tomfool wind whirled up a pair of underpants hung up to dry between two green stakes, above a wretched vegetable patch. From the river came a little tenor on a crackly gramophone.

I have tried to give the general outline of Rupert Brooke’s poetic persona. Death, which he had been so intently watching for, caught him unawares in the violet Aegean Sea, on a calm, sunny day. He did not live a long life, and the motley nature of his moods arises partly from the fact that he somehow did not quite have time to sift all his riches, did not quite have time in his life to fuse all the world’s colors into a single color, a radiant whiteness. And yet, it is not difficult to discern the main characteristic of his art—his passionate service to pure beauty….