The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke
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orn at Rugby, August 3, 1887Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, 1913Sub-Lieutenant, R.N.V.R., September, 1914Antwerp Expedition, October, 1914Sailed with British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, February 28, 1915Died in the Aegean, April 23, 1915 Introduction I Rupert Brooke was both fair to see and winning in his ways. There wasat the first contact both bloom and charm; and most of all there was life.To use the word his friends describe him by, he was "vivid".This vitality, though manifold in expression, is felt primarilyin his sensations -- surprise mingled with delight -- "One after one, like tasting a sweet food." This is life's "first fine rapture". It makes him patient toname over those myriad things (each of which seems like a fresh discovery)curious but potent, and above all common, that he "loved", --he the "Great Lover". Lover of what, then? Why, of "White plates and cups clean-gleaming,Ringed with blue lines," -- and the like, through thirty lines of exquisite words; and he is captivatedby the multiple brevity of these vignettes of sense, keen, momentary,ecstatic with the morning dip of youth in the wonderful stream.The poem is a catalogue of vital sensations and "dear names" as well."All these have been my loves." The spring of these emotions is the natural body, but it sends pulsationsfar into the spirit. The feeling rises in direct observation,but it is soon aware of the "outlets of the sky".He sees objects practically unrelated, and links them in strings;or he sees them pictorially; or, he sees pictures immersed as it werein an atmosphere of thought. When the process is complete,the thought suggests the picture and is its origin.Then the Great Lover revisits the bottom of the monstrous world,and imaginatively and thoughtfully recreates that strange under-sea,whose glooms and gleams and muds are well known to him asa strong and delighted swimmer; or, at the last, drifts through the dreamof a South Sea lagoon, still with a philosophical question in his mouth.Yet one can hardly speak of "completion". These are real first flights.What we have in this volume is not so much a work of artas an artist in his birth trying the wings of genius. The poet loves his new-found element. He clings to mortality;to life, not thought; or, as he puts it, to the concrete, --let the abstract "go pack!" "There's little comfort in the wise," he ends.But in the unfolding of his precocious spirit, the literary controlcomes uppermost; his boat, finding its keel, swings to the helm of mind.How should it be otherwise for a youth well-born, well-bred,in college air? Intellectual primacy showed itself to himin many wandering "loves", fine lover that he was; but in the endhe was an intellectual lover, and the magnet seems to have beenespecially powerful in the ghosts of the men of "wit", Donne, Marvell --erudite lords of language, poets in another world than ours,a less "ample ether", a less "divine air", our fathers thought,but poets of "eternity". A quintessential drop of intellectis apt to be in poetic blood. How Platonism fascinates the poets,like a shining bait! Rupert Brooke will have none of it;but at a turn of the verse he is back at it, examining, tasting, refusing.In those alternate drives of the thought in his South Sea idyl(clever as tennis play) how he slips from phenomenon to idea and reverses,happy with either, it seems, "were t'other dear charmer away".How bravely he tries to free himself from the cling of earth,at the close of the "Great Lover"! How little he succeeds!His muse knew only earthly tongues, -- so far as he understood. Why this persistent cling to mortality, -- with its quick-coming cryagainst death and its heaped anathemas on the transformations of decay?It is the old story once more: -- the vision of the first poets,the world that "passes away". The poetic eye of Keats saw it, -- "Beauty that must die,And Joy whose hand is ever at his lipsBidding adieu." The reflective mind of Arnold meditated it, -- "the world that seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." -- So Rupert Brooke, -- "But the best I've known,Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blownAbout the winds of the world, and fades from brainsOf living men, and dies.Nothing remains." And yet, -- "Oh, never a doubt but somewhere I shall wake;" again, -- "the light,Returning, shall give back the golden hours,Ocean a windless level. . . ." again, best of all, in the last word, -- "Still may Time hold some golden spaceWhere I'll unpack that scented storeOf song and flower and sky and face,And count, and touch, and turn them o'er,Musing upon them." He cannot forego his sensations, that "box of compacted sweets".He even forefeels a ghostly landscape where two shall go wanderingthrough the night, "alone". So the faith that broke its chrysalisin the first disillusionment of boyhood, in "Second Best",beautiful with the burden of Greek lyricism, ends triumphantwith the spirit still unsubdued. -- "Proud, then, clear-eyed and laughing, go to greetDeath as a friend." So go, "with unreluctant tread". But in the disillusionment of beautyand of love there is an older tone. With what bitter savor, with whatgrossness of diction, caught from the Elizabethan and satirical elementsin his culture, he spends anger in words! He reacts, he rebels, he storms.A dozen poems hardly exhaust his gall. It is not merelythat beauty and joy and love are transient, now, but in their goingthey are corrupted into their opposites, -- ugliness, pain, indifference.And his anger once stilled by speech, what lassitude follows! Life, in this volume, is hardly less evident by its ecstasythan by its collapse. It is a book of youth, sensitive, vigorous, sound;but it is the fruit of intensity, and bears the traits.The search for solitude, the relief from crowds, the open door into nature;the sense of flight and escape; the repeated thought of safety,the insistent fatigue, the cry for sleep; -- all these bear confessionin their faces. "Flight", "Town and Country", "The Voice", are eloquentof what they leave untold; and the climax of "Retrospect", -- "And I should sleep, and I should sleep," -- or the sestet of "Waikiki", or the whole fainting sonnetentitled "A Memory", belong to the nadir of vitality. At momentsweariness set in like a spiritual tide. I associate, too, with such moods,psychologically at least, his visions of the "arrested moment", as in"Dining-Room Tea", -- a sort of trance state -- or in the pendant sonnet.Analogous moods are not infrequent in the great poets. Rupert Brookeseems to have faltered, nervously, at times; these poems mirror faithfullysuch moments. But even when the image of life, imaginative or real,falters so, how essentially vital it still is, and clothed in an exquisitebody of words like the traditional "rainbow hues of the dying fish"!For I cannot express too strongly my admiration of the literary senseof this young poet, and my delight in it. "All these have been my loves,"he says, if I may repeat the phrase; but he seems to have loved the words,as much as the things, -- "dear names", he adds. The born man of lettersspeaks there. So, when his pulse is at its lowest,he cannot forget the beautiful surface of his South Sea idylsor of versified English gardens and lanes. He cared as muchfor the expression as for the thing, which is what makes a man of letters.So fixed is this habit that his art, truly, is independentof his bodily state. In his poems of "collapse" as in those of "ecstasy"he seems to me equally master of his mood, -- like those poets who are"for all time". His literary skill in verse was ripe, how long so everhe might have to live.
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