1914 and Other Poems

by Rupert Brooke

The poetry of one of World War I's great poets. Includes some of Brooke's earlier poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, World War I, War, Fiction, British Literature

33 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1915

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found a beautiful first edition of this collection at the used bookstore I work at.

I thought 1914 was a wonderfully pleasant surprise. I've never heard of Brooke or his work but I really enjoyed this. It's definitely a collection I would like to revisit again, particularly sitting outside in nature.

For poems written over 100 years ago, I thought the themes of romance and heartbreak were much more straightforward than I would have expected for that time period. But I really enjoyed it and felt like I could feel Brooke's emotions radiating through his words. It was pretty special.

I loved this collection and definitely recommend if you can find a copy! I really just stumbled across it and I'm happy I did.

[Carol, She's so Novel ꧁꧂ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to think about both my rating & review on this one!

It's ANZAC Day tomorrow & my husband & I used to read poetry by Brooke, Wilfred Owen & Siegfried Sassoon on this day - don't know why we stopped. & maybe I should have gone for a collection of WW1 poems because it's hard to believe the beautiful & conflicted young man

who gave us The Soldier (If I should die, think only this of me...) also wrote dreck like this (a fragment from The Great Lover)

I have been so great a lover:filled my days
So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise,
The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,
Desire illimitable,and still content...

Yeesh.

3* seems fair.

Lest we forget.

[Michael Arnold · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've never really liked Rupert Brooke, though mostly in the past it was because of his war poems and he seems too proudly English for my tastes. I decided to give him another read, and found that actually aside from his war poems he was pretty competent as a poet. He's still not exactly a favourite poet of mine - but I now see his place. I can't help but notice his influence on Frost too, especially 'Retrospect', which ends:

'Lay my head, and nothing said,
In your hands, ungarlanded;
And a long watch you would keep;
And I should sleep, and I should sleep!'

It's so like 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening':

'The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.'

So the influence is certainly there on someone I think is a better, more metaphysical poet. But no, Brooke isn't anywhere near as trite and dull as I used to think he was. And so I guess that's a message for us all.

That said, all this is perfectly Georgian - you can almost imagine this being something George Bowling (from George Orwell's 'Coming up for Air') would have written while fishing and bored. But at the same time, if Brooke had lived to see the dominance of Modernism by Eliot and Pound, Joyce, and Yeats, would that have changed his writing and mindset? Could he have been one of the greats had he not been killed in Europe's largest slagging match (other than the other one)? He did have talent, and even I can see that.

Interesting.

[B)iaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a poetry girlie now.

[Jazzy Lemon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This copy was found in November 2016 in Barter's Books, Northumberland. 70 years ago it had been given as a gift with the inscription:

To Joan
With all love
Robbie
Nov. 1946

Whilst wearing my poppy bracelet on my wrist, this book fell open to page 15 to this oh so familiar of poems:

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. 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
Given 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.

And I bought this treasure and took it home with me.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brooke was one of the War Poets and one of many many men who lost their lives in the Great War. His poems are powerful and evocative and make one wonder how far his career would have gone if he hadn't died so young.

[Jazzy Lemon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who could improve on Rupert Brooke? ...oh! and yet

Stands the church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

[Susan Molloy · Rating 4 out of 5]

✔️Published in 1914.
🖊 My review: A pleasing collection of poetry that made the end of a good day a serene one in the evening for me. 📌 I would read this again.
🤔 My rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟
🟣 Media form: Kindle version.
🟢 E-book format found here on : Project Gutenberg .
🔲 Excerpts of note:

🔸 WAIKIKI
Warm perfumes like a breath from vine and tree Drift down the darkness. Plangent, hidden from eyes, Somewhere an eukaleli* thrills and cries And stabs with pain the night's brown savagery. And dark scents whisper; and dim waves creep to me, Gleam like a woman's hair, stretch out, and rise; And new stars burn into the ancient skies, Over the murmurous soft Hawaian [sic]sea. And I recall, lose, grasp, forget again, And still remember, a tale I have heard, or known An empty tale, of idleness and pain, Of two that loved—or did not love—and one Whose perplexed heart did evil, foolishly, A long while since, and by some other sea. –Waikiki, 1913
*ukelele

🔸 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.

✿●▬●✿●✿●▬●✿

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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-...

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this collection as part of my World War One reading, but this isn't really a World War One collection. It features, as part of 1914, the famous "The Soldier" aka "If I should die think only this of me'.

It's interesting that the most famous Brooke lines are parts of longer poems. I've already mentioned "The Soldier" from 1914. And the final few lines of "Granchester":

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?

Which now seem to mark the end of one kind of England.

The poems are fine. They feel Edwardian to me. The language feels self-consciously poetic. They seem to have been written before 1914 mostly. Some in the Pacific and Granchester in Berlin. It did make me realise I know nothing about Rupert Brooke at all apart from where he died and roughly when. This is something I need to deal with.

There were a couple of poems I really liked: "He Wonders Whether To Blame or Praise Her" (which felt like an echo of one of Blake's poems) and "Song".

I've got a fuller collection of Brooke's poetry to read so I'll be interested to see what I think when I get to the end of that.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

O dear my loves, O faithless, once again
This one last gift I give: that after men
Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed,
Praise you, 'All these were lovely'; say, 'He loved'

---

This little treasure of a book was found in my family bookcase, collecting dust amongst such awe-inspiring titles as "Trees of Britain" volumes one through five.

I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of poetry is slim and my knowledge of Rupert Brooke is even slimmer but when I saw "The Soldier" in this collection I was assured my GCSE in English lit had at least taught me something.

Brooke is known almost solely for his war poems, yet I found his poems on love, longing, and living more impactful than I'd expected. Big fan.

[Scott Whitney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a mix of sentimental poetry, travel poetry, and war poetry. I could savor the lines and the images which his poetry evokes. I found reading this poetry is best done one poem at a time with time in between to get the rhythm, meter, and rhyme out of your head from the last poem before getting into the next. There is a simple beauty about his poetry. It would have been interesting to read some later works if he had not been taken out of this world too soon.

"The Soldier" and "The Funeral of Youth" were my favorite reads from this collection. I will use them when teaching.

[Luke Gorham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite of the WWI poets. *Shrug*

[Jane Reid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful poignant poetry

[Samira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely exquisite

[Rafael M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Não pensei que ia gostar tanto deste poeta. Adorei principalmente os poemas românticos.

[Vincent Darkhelm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slim volume. But includes some of the best First World War poetry.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Majestic, lofty, sad, steeped in melancholy; a joy to read; one excerpt;

"All these have been my loves. And these shall pass, Whatever passes not, in the great hour, Nor all my passion, all my prayers, have power To hold them with me through the gate of Death. They'll play deserter, turn with the traitor breath, Break the high bond we made, and sell Love's trust And sacramented covenant to the dust. —Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake, And give what's left of love again, and make New friends, now strangers.... But the best I've known, Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown About the winds of the world, and fades from brains Of living men, and dies. Nothing remains. O dear my loves, O faithless, once again This one last gift I give: that after men Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed, Praise you, "All these were lovely"; say, "He loved."

[Chris Lilly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly awful Georgian tosh, with weird departures for Hawaii and Tahiti that give new weight to the concept 'overwritten'. But the dead soldier sonnets are fine, and the paean for Grantchester is quite funny (intentionally) and there's a good poem about a fishes idea of heaven which I didn't know.

[Hayley Shaver · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book of poems. The poems in this book pondered the mysteries of life and death. The poetry was awesome. You can find the book at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33902/...

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant

[Glen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed reading ... Wish I'd given myself more time to savour his work ...

[Kaiser · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some lovely lines and stanzas scattered throughout but overall pretty dull.

[Sareene · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read it for the poems on war, which weren't many.