Rupert Brooke
Rupert Chawner Brooke (middle name sometimes given as Chaucer) was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially The Soldier. He was also known for his boyish good looks, which it is alleged prompted the Irish poet W.B. Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man in England."
Brooke was born at 5 Hillmorton Road in Rugby, Warwickshire, the second of the three sons of William Parker Brooke, a Rugby schoolmaster, and Ruth Mary Brooke, née Cotterill. He was educated at two independent schools in the market town of Rugby, Warwickshire; Hillbrow School and Rugby School.
While travelling in Europe he prepared a thesis entitled John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama, which won him a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he became a member of the Cambridge Apostles, helped found the Marlowe Society drama club and acted in plays including the Cambridge Greek Play.
Brooke made friends among the Bloomsbury group of writers, some of whom admired his talent while others were more impressed by his good looks. Virginia Woolf boasted to Vita Sackville-West of once going skinny-dipping with Brooke in a moonlit pool when they were at Cambridge together.
Brooke belonged to another literary group known as the Georgian Poets and was one of the most important of the Dymock poets, associated with the Gloucestershire village of Dymock where he spent some time before the war. He also lived in the Old Vicarage, Grantchester.
Brooke suffered a severe emotional crisis in 1912, caused by sexual confusion and jealousy, resulting in the breakdown of his long relationship with Ka Cox (Katherine Laird Cox). Brooke's paranoia that Lytton Strachey had schemed to destroy his relationship with Cox by encouraging her to see Henry Lamb precipitated his break with his Bloomsbury Group friends and played a part in his nervous collapse and subsequent rehabilitation trips to Germany.
As part of his recuperation, Brooke toured the United States and Canada to write travel diaries for the Westminster Gazette. He took the long way home, sailing across the Pacific and staying some months in the South Seas. Much later it was revealed that he may have fathered a daughter with a Tahitian woman named Taatamata with whom he seems to have enjoyed his most complete emotional relationship. Brooke fell heavily in love several times with both men and women, although his bisexuality was edited out of his life by his first literary executor. Many more people were in love with him. Brooke was romantically involved with the actress Cathleen Nesbitt and was once engaged to Noel Olivier, whom he met, when she was aged 15, at the progressive Bedales School.
Brooke was an inspiration to poet John Gillespie Magee, Jr., author of the poem "High Flight". Magee idolised Brooke and wrote a poem about him ("Sonnet to Rupert Brooke"). Magee also won the same poetry prize at Rugby School which Brooke had won 34 years earlier.
As a war poet Brooke came to public attention in 1915 when The Times Literary Supplement quoted two of his five sonnets (IV: The Dead and V: The Soldier) in full on 11 March and his sonnet V: The Soldier was read from the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday (4 April). Brooke's most famous collection of poetry, containing all five sonnets, 1914 & Other Poems, was first published in May 1915 and, in testament to his popularity, ran to 11 further impressions that year and by June 1918 had reached its 24th impression; a process undoubtedly fueled through posthumous interest.
“Spend the glittering moonlight therePursuing down the soundless deepLimbs 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 laughterAnd faces individual,Well this side of Paradise! . . .There's little comfort in the wise.”
“That night, how could I sleep?I lay and watched the lonely gloom;And watched the moonlight creepFrom wall to basin, round the room.All night I could not sleep.”
“All the day I held the memory of you, and woveIts laughter with the dancing light o' the spray,And sowed the sky with tiny clouds of love...”
“Love is a flame; - we have beaconed the world's night.A city: - and we have built it, these and I.An emperor: - we have taught the world to die.”
“If I should die, think only this of me:That there's some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England.”
“Ah God! to see the branches stir Across the moon at Grantchester! To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten Unforgettable, unforgotten River-smell, and hear the breeze Sobbing in the little trees. Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand Still guardians of that holy land? The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream, The yet unacademic streamIs dawn a secret shy and cold Anadyomene, silver-gold? And sunset still a golden sea From Haslingfield to Madingley? And after, ere the night is born,Do hares come out about the corn? Oh, is the water sweet and cool, Gentle and brown, above the pool? And laughs the immortal river still Under the mill, under the mill?Say, is there Beauty yet to find? And Certainty? and Quiet kind? Deep meadows yet, for to forget The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?”
“I said I splendidly loved you; it’s not true.Such long swift tides stir not a land-locked sea.On gods or fools the high risk falls–on you–The clean clear bitter-sweet that’s not for me.Love soars from earth to ecstasies unwist.Love is flung Lucifer-like from Heaven to Hell.But–there are wanderers in the middle mist,Who cry for shadows, clutch, and cannot tellWhether 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;For love of Love, or from heart’s loneliness.Pleasure’s not theirs, nor pain. They doubt, and sigh,And do not love at all. Of these am I”
“FailureBecause God put His adamantine fateBetween 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 beatThrice on the Gate, and entered with a cry --All the great courts were quiet in the sun,And full of vacant echoes: moss had grownOver the glassy pavement, and begunTo creep within the dusty council-halls.An idle wind blew round an empty throneAnd stirred the heavy curtains on the walls.”
“The CallOut 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 starsSuddenly 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 skiesThe scarlet splendour of your name,Till Heaven cracks, and Hell thereunderDies 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 facesThrough all the dark infinity.So, clothed about with perfect love,The eternal end shall find us one,Alone above the Night, aboveThe dust of the dead gods, alone.”
“A kiss makes the heart young again a wipes out all the tears.”
“A kiss makes the heart young again and wipes out all the years.”
“Stands the Church clock at ten to three?And is there honey still for tea?”
“The War Sonnets: V. 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. 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.”
“You gave me the key of your heart, my love;Then why did you make me knock?”
“...in that rich earth a richer dust concealed.(I'm flogging a dead horse w/ this one but this is the 1st time I've even seen this quotes feature! I just wanted to post something.)”