"Unstumbling, unreluctant, strong, unknowing,Borne by a will not his, that lifts, that grows,Sweeps out to darkness, triumphing in his goal,Out of the fire, out of the little room. . . .— There is an end appointed, O my soul!"
He never reached the Dardanelles. He went first to Lemnos and then to Egypt. Early in April he had a touch of sunstroke from which he recovered; but he died from blood-poisoning on board a French hospital ship at Scyros on Friday, April 23rd — died for England on the day of St. Michael and Saint George. He was buried at night, by torchlight, in an olive grove about a mile inland. "If you go there," writes Mr. Stephen Graham, "you will find a little wooden cross with just his name and the date of his birth and his death marked on it in black." A few days later the news of his death was published in the 'Times' with the following appreciation:
"W. S. C." writes: "Rupert Brooke is dead. A telegram from the Admiral at Lemnos tells us that this life has closed at the moment when it seemed to have reached its springtime. A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other — more able to express their thoughts of self-surrender, and with a power to carry comfort to those who watch them so intently from afar. The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger.
"During the last few months of his life, months of preparation in gallant comradeship and open air, the poet-soldier told with all the simple force of genius the sorrow of youth about to die, and the sure, triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit. He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced toward the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country's cause and a heart devoid of hate for fellowmen.
"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, ruled by high, undoubting purpose, he was all that one would wish England's noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered."
"W. S. C.", as many probably guessed at the time, was the Rt. Hon. Winston Spencer Churchill, a personal friend and warm admirer of the poet. Many other tributes followed, notably from an anonymous writer in the 'Spectator', from Mr. Walter de la Mare, Mr. Edward Thomas, Mr. Holbrook Jackson, Mr. Jack Collings Squire, Mr. James Douglas, Mr. Drinkwater, Mr. Gibson, and Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie. From most of these writers I have already quoted at some length, but space must yet be found for the last three, the surviving members of the brilliant quartette who produced 'New Numbers'. Mr. Drinkwater wrote as follows: "There can have been no man of his years in England who had at once so impressive a personality and so inevitable an appeal to the affection of every one who knew him, while there has not been, I think, so grievous a loss to poetry since the death of Shelley. Some of us who knew him may live to be old men, but life is not likely to give us any richer memory than his; and the passion and shapely zest that are in his work will pass safely to the memory of posterity." Mr. Wilfrid Gibson's tribute took the form of a short poem called "The Going":
He's gone.I do not understand.I only knowThat, as he turned to goAnd waved his hand,In his young eyes a sudden glory shone,And I was dazzled by a sunset glow —And he was gone.
Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, now perhaps the greatest of our younger poets and a warm personal friend of Brooke's, wrote at greater length:
"'And the worst friend and enemy is but Death' . . . 'And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.' So ended two of the five sonnets, with the common title '1914', which Rupert Brooke wrote while he was in training, between the Antwerp expedition and sailing for the Aegean. These sonnets are incomparably the finest utterance of English poetry concerning the Great War. We knew the splendid promise of Rupert Brooke's earlier poetry; these sonnets are the brief perfection of his achievement. They are much more than that: they are among the few supreme utterances of English patriotism. It was natural, perhaps, that they should leave all else that has been written about the war so far behind. It is not so much that they are the work of a talent scarcely, in its own way, to be equalled to-day; it was much more that they were the work of a poet who had for his material the feeling that he was giving up everything to fight for England — the feeling, I think, that he was giving his life for England. Reading these five sonnets now, it seems as if he had in them written his own epitaph. I believe he thought so himself; a few words he said in my last talk with him makes me believe that — now. At any rate, the history of literature, so full of Fate's exquisite ironies, has nothing more poignantly ironic, and nothing at the same time more beautifully appropriate, than the publication of Rupert Brooke's noble sonnet-sequence, '1914', a few swift weeks before the death they had imagined, and had already made lovely. Each one of these five sonnets faces, in a quiet exultation, the thought of death, of death for England; and understands, as seldom even English poetry has understood, the unspeakable beauty of the thought:
"These laid the world away; poured out the redSweet wine of youth; gave up the years to beOf work and joy, and that unhoped sereneThat men call age; and those who would have been,Their sons, they gave — their immortality.
I am strangely mistaken if the accent of the noblest English poetry does not speak to us in those lines. And again:
"If I should die, think only this of me:That there's some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England. There shall beIn 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.
"This — this music, this beauty, this courage — was Rupert Brooke. But it is, we may be sure, his immortality. It is not yet tolerable to speak of personal loss. The name seemed to stand for a magical vitality that must be safe — safe! Yes, 'and if these poor limbs die, safest of all!' What poetry has lost in him cannot be judged by any one who has not read those last sonnets, now his farewell to England and the world. I am not underrating the rest of his work. There was an intellectual keenness and brightness in it, a fire of imagery and (in the best sense) wit, the like of which had not been known, or known only in snatches, in our literature since the best days of the later Elizabethans. And it was all penetrated by a mastering passion, the most elemental of all passions — the passion for life. 'I have been so great a lover,' he cries, and artfully leads us on to think he means the usual passion of a young poet's career. But it is just life he loves, and not in any abstract sense, but all the infinite little familiar details of life catalogued with delighted jest. This was profoundly sincere: no one ever loved life more wholly or more minutely. And he celebrated his love exquisitely, often unforgettably, through all his earlier poetry, getting further intensity from a long sojourn in the South Seas. But this passion for life had never had seriously to fight for its rights and joys. Like all great lovers of life, he had pleased himself with the thought of death and after death: not insincerely, by any means, but simply because this gave a finer relish to the sense of being alive. Platonism, which offers delightful games for such subtle wit as his, he especially liked to play with. It was one more element in the life of here and now, the life of mortal thought and sense and spirit, infinitely varying and by him infinitely loved. And then came 1914; and his passion for life had suddenly to face the thought of voluntary death. But there was no struggle; for instantly the passion for life became one with the will to die — and now it has become death itself. But first Rupert Brooke had told the world once more how the passion for beautiful life may reach its highest passion and most radiant beauty when it is the determination to die."
Margaret Lavington.
London, October, 1915.
Comprised of poems written in his memory by three poets contemporary to Rupert Brooke. A short poem by Mr. Gibson is already included in the Biographical Note; a set of four of his sonnets is included here. The poems are Public Domain.
In alien earth, across a troubled sea,His body lies that was so fair and young.His mouth is stopped, with half his songs unsung;His arm is still, that struck to make men free.But let no cloud of lamentation beWhere, on a warrior's grave, a lyre is hung.We keep the echoes of his golden tongue,We keep the vision of his chivalry.So Israel's joy, the loveliest of kings,Smote now his harp, and now the hostile horde.To-day the starry roof of Heaven ringsWith psalms a soldier made to praise his Lord;And David rests beneath Eternal wings,Song on his lips, and in his hand a sword.—Joyce Kilmer, from 'Main Street and Other Poems', 1917.
IYour face was lifted to the golden skyAblaze beyond the black roofs of the squareAs flame on flame leapt, flourishing in airIts tumult of red stars exultantlyTo the cold constellations dim and high:And as we neared the roaring ruddy flareKindled to gold your throat and brow and hairUntil you burned, a flame of ecstasy.The golden head goes down into the nightQuenched in cold gloom — and yet again you standBeside me now with lifted face alight,As, flame to flame, and fire to fire you burn . . .Then, recollecting, laughingly you turn,And look into my eyes and take my hand.
IIOnce in my garret — you being far awayTramping the hills and breathing upland air,Or so I fancied — brooding in my chair,I watched the London sunshine feeble and greyDapple my desk, too tired to labour more,When, looking up, I saw you standing thereAlthough I'd caught no footstep on the stair,Like sudden April at my open door.Though now beyond earth's farthest hills you fare,Song-crowned, immortal, sometimes it seems to meThat, if I listen very quietly,Perhaps I'll hear a light foot on the stairAnd see you, standing with your angel air,Fresh from the uplands of eternity.
IIIYour eyes rejoiced in colour's ecstasy,Fulfilling even their uttermost desire,When, over a great sunlit field afireWith windy poppies streaming like a seaOf scarlet flame that flaunted riotouslyAmong green orchards of that western shire,You gazed as though your heart could never tireOf life's red flood in summer revelry.And as I watched you, little thought had IHow soon beneath the dim low-drifting skyYour soul should wander down the darkling way,With eyes that peer a little wistfully,Half-glad, half-sad, remembering, as they seeLethean poppies, shrivelling ashen grey.
IVOctober chestnuts showered their perishing goldOver us as beside the stream we layIn the Old Vicarage garden that blue day,Talking of verse and all the manifoldDelights a little net of words may hold,While in the sunlight water-voles at playDived under a trailing crimson bramble-spray,And walnuts thudded ripe on soft black mould.Your soul goes down unto a darker streamAlone, O friend, yet even in death's deep nightYour eyes may grow accustomed to the darkAnd Styx for you may have the ripple and gleamOf your familiar river, and Charon's barkTarry by that old garden of your delight.—Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, 1916.
Though we, a happy few,Indubitably knewThat from the purple cameThis poet of pure flame,The world first saw his lightFlash on an evil night,And heard his song from farAbove the drone of war.Out of the primal darkHe leapt, like lyric lark,Singing his aubade strain;Then fell to earth again.We garner all he gave,And on his hero grave,For love and honour strew,Rosemary, myrtle, rue.Son of the Morning, weHad kept you thankfully;But yours the asphodel:Hail, singer, and farewell!—Eden Phillpotts, from 'Plain Song, 1914-1916'.