The Complete Poems

by Rupert Brooke

Contents Include 1905-1908 Second Best Day that I have Loved Sleeping Out-Full Moon In Examination Pine-Trees and the Sky:Evening Wagner The Vision of the Archangels Seaside On the Death of Smet-Smet The Song of the Pilgrims The Song of the Beasts Failure Ante Aram Dawn The Call The Wayfarers The Begginer EXPERIMENTS-Choriambics-I CHORIAMBICS-II Desertion 1908-1911 Sonnet:Oh! Death will find me, etc GRANTCHESTER-The Old Vicarage, Grantchester OTHER POEMS Beauty and Beauty Song, etc THE SOUTH SEAS Mutability Clouds A Memory, etc 1914 The Treasure Peace Safety The Dead The Soldier

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

164 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1932

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

[Carol, She's so Novel ꧁꧂]

From our town's museum. It was ANZAC Day yesterday. I'm the photographer.

Rupert Brooke is considered one of the great war poets, based mainly on that great poem, The Soldier, but the other poems in the (short) 1914 section are so beautiful as well, especially the second of The Dead poems.

"The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.

I was only going to read these poems, but I will read at least the South Seas section before reshelving this book.

1913, Public Domain

I had good intentions, but didn't get back to this one. Putting on my In Hibernation shelf for now.

ANZAC Day here & my husband & I read Safety together. So beautiful.

War knows no power. safe shall be my going
Secretly armed against all death's endeavour;

Lest We Forget.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collections includes one of my favourite ever poems, The Soldier, and several other of Brooke's poems which made me sit back and think "wow". So he was certainly a talented writer. However, upon doing some googling, I have discovered that he was an anti-semite and a misogynist amongst other grimace-inducing labels. As much as I want to separate the artist from the art, it definitely put a sour taste in my mouth as I finished reading the collection, so don't think I can give it more than three stars, purely because he was an arsehole.

[Lydia · Rating 5 out of 5]

RIP Rupert Brooke you would've loved Hozier

[Angi M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Rupert Brooke mainly for one line in 'the Soldier' that says "in that rich earth a richer dust concealed". I just love that. It applies to everything.

[Milo · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Rupert Brooke was the perfect life, and the perfect England. Forever young, buried on some Grecian shore, among his better heroes: for Brooke England was of beauty distilled, the demi-paradise, the quaint Eden. His England was not real – he sought it, so it seems, in Pacific wilderness, and in classical allusion; his was an England of spirit, not corpus. His youth was illimitable: in all his poetry – all of which might be called juvenilia – he seems to brandish naïve love, and superficial expressions of the infinite. This is a man who has lived only slightly, and who reaches at not the angels he has seen, but those he has read about; a vibrant literacy tipples through his many writings, the student-mind gleaming. He is not, it might be added, a great poet – it seems he died too young and too perfectly to allow such development, if such was owed. After the war, his brand of Georgian dreaming would be scuppered entirely by a new phase of abstraction; these glorious appeals to beauty and love were instantly passe, not least through the inexpert hand – and Brooke’s was no other. So better, then, that Brooke’s poetry died before it was killed; better, then, that these fragments survive unblemished by their descendency. A few of which seem, in their simple poise, in their earnest affection, to defy the requirement of greatness. Take ‘Grantchester’, which must be the finest encomium to the boring, perfect England ever written: fine because it is not overfine; it is not critical; it is not spun by the light fantastic. It is instead the report of a young man who misses home – the green fields of imagination; the parochial, nonsense divisions of his Cambridge; those common things that only belong to England. I think there is some shred of Shakespeare in Brooke, though largely in the way the both write of their homeplace; though even Shakespeare is willing to spike his pearly towers with irony – does this England not conclude with a spiteful, perennial jab at those men who deign to rule that sceptred isle? Brooke’s oeuvre perhaps never takes it in itself to acknowledge the political reality, or indeed the material reality of the new England; he is much too busy musing on lovers, or on rural idyll, to make such concession; even when he does strike toward the doom of man (as in ‘One Day’), he does so in the cloak of romance, and mythic destiny. This is equally true in his final poem – and could there be a more suiting farewell? – in which Brooke is wholly taken by the Shakespearean ghost. That there’s some corner of a foreign field | That is for ever England. These lines could be taken from Henry V; if told they belonged to some long-lost Quatro, I would have believed it; where Owen was languid and solemn, and Sassoon fiercely sarcastic, Brooke’s brief stint as war poet remarks the wholly opposite inclination. In him is war still glorious; is death in arms beautiful; is held all the Trojan heroism handed through the ages. It would be repulsive if he did not state it so earnestly, if he did not find in it some profoundly optimistic reverence for his homeland. It seems the natural sequel to ‘Grantchester’ – only one who feels so vividly for his imagined home can so vividly imagine his death in its defence; Brooke seems entirely divided from the actual world, instead acting out his theatre of heroics, and beauty, and love, out in some now-lost resort; the kind that could only ever be lost, that could only ever breathe in poetry. Perhaps the kind that resists great poetry, such is its blinkered fixation. But it is an ideal, as Brooke is an ideal, and for its failures it is an appealing one; it can fill the chest; it can make one feel in love with the place he belongs to. That is, I suspect, the meaning of Brooke; of his art; of his early-snuffing. He did not die in England, but in Greece. He did not die in battle, but dreaming of battle. He writes that which we wish we were; and with his death went too the living dream.

[Daniel Quinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE CALL

Out 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 stars
Suddenly 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 skies
The scarlet splendour of your name,

Till Heaven cracks, and Hell thereunder
Dies in her ultimate made 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 faces
Through all the dark infinity.

So, clothed about with perfect love,
The eternal end shall find us one,
Alone above the Night, above
The dust of the dead gods, alone.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't know any of Brooke's work before reading this collection. These poems ache with love broken, love unrequited, and death too young. The set form poems (mostly sonnets) are done well. Some of the best work is the back of the book. The amusing poem "A Little Dog's Day" could have been a great children's book, and "The Soldier" strangely prescient for a man who died so young. Plenty of classic lines in the latter. Like all good poetry this was best digested a few pages at a time.

[Theo Smaller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brooke’s poetry is subtle, philosophical and tender. It has an air of British prosperity about it, if that makes sense. Of course this is evident in a poem like The Solider, but I found it ran through most of his works, a polite hesitance that feels characteristically English.

I’m not a patriotic man myself, but Brooke’s work did remind me that there are some things about this country that aren’t all bad- the people, namely, can be quite lovely. The poetry in this collection looks at human emotion honestly and openly, interrogates loneliness, analyses love, and does all with a beautiful sense of rhythm.

[julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

And so I never feared to see
You wander down the street,
Or come across the fields to me
On ordinary feet.
For what they'd never told me of,
And what I never knew ;
It was that all the time, my love,
Love would be merely you.

[julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought when love for you died, I should die.
It's dead. Alone, most strangely, I live on.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

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

I always thought these lines were written by John Betjeman, well that shows you that I really don't know anything about poetry! They're the last lines of 'The old Vicarage, Grantchester' by Rupert Brooke.

I enjoyed the language and style of the poems, but very few have stayed with me now that I've finished. There's one entitled 'Jealousy' that I liked, mainly for its honesty, bitterness and rye humour.

Brooke's poems are predominantly romantic - love that promises much and then disappoints. It's not surprising from what I've read about him; a good looking young man, women (and men) were constantly throwing themselves at him!

As the war approaches, the poems alter in tone. At this point, there is one true stand out and it's the poem he's most famous for: '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....

It's especially poignant as he died during the opening months of WW1.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

My mother and I are very fond of Deborah Crombie's series of mysteries; one references a Brooke poem at the beginning of every chapter. I remember very well the sunshine coming through the windows at our old apartment in San Francisco; and the gleeful and almost shy look on her face, when Mom presented this volume. My copy is worn, clearly well-loved by someone in the past, the dark on the corners rubbed away with long use and part of the spine torn away. It's one of those books that I turn to when in need; both the familiarity of my mother and Brooke's words forming a bulwark to rest against.

'Mid Death's gathering winds, frightened and dumb,
sick for the past, may I
Feel you suddenly there, cool at my brow; then may
I hear the peace
Of your voice at the last, whispering love, calling, ere all
can cease
In the silence of death; then may I see dimly, and
know, a space,
Bending over me, last light in the dark, once, as of old,
your face.

[ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Breathless classical poetry that gets darker and more radical toward the end. Rupert Brooke, born of a high English family, likely queer, emotionally destabilized by Virginia Woolf, enlisted in the British navy for Gallipoli but died of a mosquito bite -- there was a lot to inspire him.

[Ricky · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are wonderful poems that cover a wide range of subjects which includes love, war, nature and much more. Brooke is a talented poet and an intelligent thinker, he deserve his status as a true great.

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

how do i love thee? thy poetry is nothing less than brilliance.

[James Schwartz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really amazing poet!