POETS Day! Rupert Brooke

Welcome once again to POETS Day, that wonderous day where we do our best to usher in the weekend, Henry Ford’s greatest creation, a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. You know the drill. Disassemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle into a friendly neighborhood joint a few hours before even happy hour begins, get in a Twitter fight about Tulsi Gabbard, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park pondering National Sausage Pizza Day and other highlights of the last five days, go for a swim, or God forbid, go for a light jog. It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

Oscar Wilde is often credited with writing “the Love that dare not speak its name.” It wasn’t his. “The Love” phrase came from “Two Loves,” a poem by Lord Alfred Douglas, or Bosie as he was called. Bosie was the son of John Sholto Douglas, 9^th Marquess of Queensbury and noted boxing enthusiant. It was dad who, upon hearing about his son’s dalliances with Wilde, instigated the imbroglio that led to legal wranglings and Wilde’s imprisonment and eventual death. It seems Bosie knew the whys of what he dared not speak.

Another thing Bosie knew was that he really didn’t like this week’s poet. Per Wikipedia, he wrote in the afterward of his Collected Poems: “… never before in the history of English literature has poetry sunk so low. When a nation which has produced Shakespeare and Marlowe and Chaucer and Milton and Shelley and Wordsworth and Byron and Keats and Tennyson and Blake can seriously lash itself into enthusiasm over the puerile crudities (when they are nothing worse) of a Rupert Brooke, it simply means that poetry is despised and dishonoured and that sane criticism is dead or moribund.”

That’s harsh stuff. Thankfully, at least in my humble opinion, it’s flat wrong although I can see how some of his contemporaries might have dismissed Brooke as nothing more than a pretty boy. I was looking over War Poet’s work when I saw his picture. “Wow. That guy’s good looking,” I said. My wife took a look. “Wow, you’re right,” she said. “He is good looking.” From Joanna Scutts’ New Yorker article (well worth a read), “Just about everyone who met him described his physical appearance in rapturous terms. ‘That is exactly what Adonis must have looked like in the eyes of Aphrodite,’ Leonard Woolf wrote. Yeats dubbed him ‘the handsomest young man in England.’”

He didn’t let those good looks lie fallow. A series of affairs with notable men and women and in the hundred plus years since his death letters and reports evidencing previously unknown affairs leave the casual reader wondering how someone who died so young managed to find the time to write at all, much less brilliantly.

Brooke loved fast, and after a mosquito bite led to a fatal blood infection enroute to the Dardanelles, presaged Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, and Cobain in dying young.

His most famous line of poetry is from this week’s selection, “V. The Soldier.” “If I should die think only this of me:/ That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England.” Brooke’s corpse colonized a patch of the Greek island of Skyros. His unfortunate parents buried their eldest son Dick, who passed at twenty-six of pneumonia in 1907. His only sister died in infancy in 1886, and less than four months after Rupert’s death his last remaining brother, “Podge,” was buried in another newly minted bit of England along the Western Front, leaving the Brooke nest forever empty.

He wrote five patriotic sonnets that were published in August of 1914. They were “I. Peace,” “II. Safety,” “III. The Dead,” “IV. The Dead,” and finally, the poem featured today, “V. The Soldier.” They’re all impressive works in my opinion. Brooke is said to have favored “IV. The Dead.” I lean towards “III. The Dead” but “V. The Soldier” is easily the most recognized.

He’s true to the sonnet form in all five but doesn’t use the same rhyme scheme in each. In “V. The Soldier” the octave is set in a/b/a/b/c/d/c/d and the octet in e/f/g/e/f/g. The standard English ten syllable per line tradition that’s kind of a requirement is honored except when it’s not – he’s pushing it, but a forgivable few lines go to eleven.

Rupert Brooke is considered one of the War Poets but he’s remarkably different in tone from what we’ve come to expect when we hear that term. He’s not Wilfred Owens. Rupert Brooke wrote from a more innocent time when patriotism and duty had yet to meet the realities of the trenches. Who knows what he would have written had he landed in the Dardanelles and survived Gallipoli. Exposed to warfare, an older Rupert Brooke, I suspect, would have a bleaker outlook. But he didn’t land in the Dardanelles.

V. The Soldier

Rupert Brooke (1887 – 1915)

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 the 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.