THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS
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ntroductionif Rupert Brooke was both fair to see and winningin his ways. There was at the first contact bothbloom and charm; and most of all there was life.To use the word his friends describe him by, hewas “vivid.” This vitality, though manifold inexpression, is felt primarily in his sensations—sur-prise mingled with delight— “One after one, like tasting a sweet food.” This is life’s “first fine rapture.” It makes himpatient to name over those myriad things (each ofwhich seems like a fresh discovery) curious butpotent, 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 exquisitewords; and he is captivated by the multiple brevityof these vignettes of sense, keen, momentary, ecstaticwith the morning dip of youth in the wonderfulstream. “The poem is a catalogue of vital sensations 3 and “dear names” as well. “All these have beenmy loves.” The spring of these emotions is the natural body,but it sends pulsations far into the spirit. The feel-ing rises in direct observation, but it is soon awareof the ‘outlets of the sky.’ He sees objects prac-tically unrelated, and links them in strings; or hesees them pictorially; or, he sees pictures immersedas it were in an atmosphere of thought. When theprocess is complete, the thought suggests the pictureand is its origin. Then the Great Lover revisitsthe bottom of the monstrous world, and imagina-tively and thoughtfully recreates that strange under-sea, whose glooms and gleams and muds are wellknown to him as a strong and delighted swimmer;or, at the last, drifts through the dream of a SouthSea lagoon, still with a philosophical question in hismouth. Yet one can hardly speak of “completion.”These are real first flights. What we have in thisvolume is not so much a work of art as an artist inhis birth trying the wings of genius. The poet loves his new-found element. Heclings to mortality; to life, not thought; or, as heputs it, to the concrete,—let the abstract “go pack!”“’There’s little comfort in the wise,” he ends. Butin the unfolding of his precocious spirit, the literarycontrol comes uppermost; his boat, finding its keel,swings to the helm of mind. How should it beotherwise for a youth well-born, well-bred, in col-lege air? Intellectual primacy showed itself to himin many wandering “loves,” fine lover that he was;but in the end he was an intellectual lover, and the 4 magnet seems to have been especially powerful inthe ghosts of the men of “wit,” Donne, Mar-vell——erudite lords of language, poets in anotherworld than ours, a less “ample ether,” a less “divineair,’ our fathers thought, but poets of “eternity.”A quintessential drop of intellect is apt to be inpoetic blood. How Platonism fascinates the poets,like a shining bait! Rupert Brooke will have noneof it; but at a turn of the verse he is back at it, ex-amining, tasting, refusing. In those alternatedrives of the thought in his South Sea idyl (cleveras tennis play) how he slips from phenomenon toidea and reverses, happy with either, it seems, “‘weret’other dear charmer away.” How bravely he triesto free himself from the cling of earth, at the closeof the “Great Lover!” How little he succeeds!His muse knew only earthly tongues,—so far as heunderstood. Why this persistent cling to mortality,—with itsquick-coming cry against death and its heaped ana-themas on the transformations of decay? It is theold story once more:—the vision of the first poets,the world that “passes away.” ‘The poetic eye ofKeats 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, 5 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 blown About the winds of the world, and fades from brainsOf living men, and dies.
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