Rupert Brooke (1887–1915)

It’s easy to dismiss these poems without due consideration that they are the early efforts of someone who died at 27: Brooke died on St. George’s Day in April 1915 on a naval ship bound for Gallipoli. He never had the opportunity to either fulfill his promise or to prove his critics right. As the forward to this edition of 1915 notes, this is a book of youth. While I did not respond to most of the poems, I admired a few and could see the early promise. Anyone who cannot relate to a show more single poem or even a few sentences and turns of phrase has never been young.

‘Pine Trees and the Sky’ re a moment’s bliss that follows a good wallow; lines from Second Best: “Clear-visioned, though it break you; far apart from the dead best, the dear and old delight;” and “And the light, Returning, shall give back the golden hours,” on the futility of wanting to recapture a youthful passion; ‘The Song of the Beasts’ reminds me of sneaking out on a hot summer night: “Come away! Come away! Ye are sober and dull through the common day, But now it is night. It is shameful night, and God is asleep!” and simply the allure of duality; ‘The Wayfarer’ speaks to the desire to find that far border town, the desert’s edge, where we could slip away from reality; and the wry maturity of ‘The One Before the Last’ shows a humour about oneself. Brooke is mostly famous for the so-called War Sonnets: the two best, for me, are ‘Safety’ (“We have found safety with all things undying”) embracing what one loved in life amid stoicism, and the very famous ‘The Soldier’ which resonates if you know you will die far from where you were born and/or if you know the loss of someone who gave their life in military service. show less

1947 Faber edition of Brooke's culturally significant poetry collection, containing his five-sonnet cycle of war poems published within weeks of his death on active duty in WWI. That he died from an infected mosquito bite and never saw combat was less mentioned at the time, and that he died in 1915, before the worst excesses of industrialised War, made his elegiac poems a perfect propaganda memorialisation of the millions of Patriotic Dead. Despite his frequent recourse to English show more Exceptionalism, there is an undoubted emotional power to his war poems, frequently carved in marble on Cenotaphs and quoted by right-wing nationalistic demagogues, ironically so as Brooke was a member of the socialist Fabian Society for much of his short adult life.

The other poems can be nostalgically evocative, bitterly misogynistic, and overblown by turns. Reading something of his life, relationships and attitudes didn't greatly endear him to me but, at the same time, I feel a compassion for a young man raised in a stultifying atmosphere of late Victorian sexual repression and harshly proscribed class expectations.

Another of those lives lost to War about whose unrealised future contribution to culture we can only mournfully speculate.

Of the articles I read about Brooke, I found this one from The New Yorker most interesting: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-true-story-of-rupert-brooke show less

I had this book for at least ten years before I read it. I picked it up at a used-book store when I was sweeping the place for poetry books. I'm sorry I waited so long. Brooke is the best new (to me) poet I've come across in a long time. I've always known I'd come to the Georgian poets eventually, that true stock of poetry from the good old tradition, the thread that was sadly cut off by the Great War in Europe and the realms of poesy. Modernism ruined the matter and meter of poetry, killed show more its audience, and sent the true heirs of the English poetic tradition into exile, where they cower together, few and unknown. Any of the nonsense writers of the last century could only dream of doing what Brooke did; no doubt they daren't read him for shame. show less

The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke is a collection of all his poems the editors found fit to print organized from last to first with a collection of fragments from his final journey to Gallipoli in an appendix at the end. The problem with collections ordered this way is that all the good stuff is at the beginning, and the drift towards juvenilia makes for increasingly tiresome reading. Considering that Brooke's best work was done in a few short years before his early death from septicemia show more on the Mediterranean front of World War I, at times it becomes quite a slog. But Brooke wrote poems worth reading: including his war sonnets, "Grantcester", and some very interesting pieces set in Polynesia. And he deserves to be remembered, as a minor poet, perhaps, but as someone who had genuine poetic talent. It helps that both he and I are fans of the poets of the 90s. At times you can feel a bit of their rhythmic musicality come through his more modern style. So if you are interested in poets who died in World War I or just 20th century poets in general, Brooke is one you will want to bump into, and this volume is a good way to do so. show less