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The Poems of Rupert Brooke
The poetry of Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) remains memorable for its charming lyrical quality and the way in which his sonnets perfectly recapture the mood of England at the start of World War I. This volume reprints his complete oeuvre, from the early lyric poems to those written shortly before his premature death: "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester," "Tiare Tahiti," "The Great Lover," "The Dead," "The Soldier," and many others.
Brooke enlisted in the Royal Navy at the outbreak of the war in 1914 and entered the literary scene early the following year, when two of his sonnets ("The Dead" and "The Soldier") appeared in London's Times Literary Supplement.The 27-year-old poet died shortly afterward aboard a ship bound for Gallipoli. His 1914 and Other Poems was published immediately afterward to wide acclaim. Brooke remains among Britain's best-loved cultural figures, and his works evoke the tranquility of prewar life and the ideals of heroic self-sacrifice.
Brooke enlisted in the Royal Navy at the outbreak of the war in 1914 and entered the literary scene early the following year, when two of his sonnets ("The Dead" and "The Soldier") appeared in London's Times Literary Supplement.The 27-year-old poet died shortly afterward aboard a ship bound for Gallipoli. His 1914 and Other Poems was published immediately afterward to wide acclaim. Brooke remains among Britain's best-loved cultural figures, and his works evoke the tranquility of prewar life and the ideals of heroic self-sacrifice.
158 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 21, 2001
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About the author
Rupert Brooke
237 books114 followersRupert 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
December 19, 2024
It seemed like an endless summer, filled with a steady stream of sunlight and friendly laughter. It was June, 1971.
I turned in from the bustling bright sidewalks of San Francisco under a red awning and into the open doorway of an old but well-appointed bookshop.
Awaiting me there was this book.
Reading it, I was carried away - and as I reread The Great Lover, I vowed to memorize the entire poem.
I did. As we left Frisco the next day I proudly declaimed the poem (being roundly dissed by my carmates)!
I still remember parts of Brooke's long lead-in to the list of things he loved in his short life:
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,
And all dear names men use to cheat despair
For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear
Our hearts at random down the dark of life.
On April 23, 1915, the young Rupert Brooke died of blood poisoning - ironically, on an army hospital ship anchored in Greece BEFORE the wholesale slaughter of the Battle of Gallipoli.
His lucky stars had cut his brief life short and steered him safely away from a much more cruel and senseless death.
And I’m sure this great young poet - whom I’ve always thought was the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s lamented young friend in the Waves who met with an untimely end - has gone to his Blest Reward.
For Woolf’s young friend, whose life was such a legacy of gladness to all the characters in The Waves, lived his short life forever Reaching for a Star...
A Star that was now forever falling into a blood-red sea outside the humid port holes of a Red Cross ship off the lonely Turkish shore.
I turned in from the bustling bright sidewalks of San Francisco under a red awning and into the open doorway of an old but well-appointed bookshop.
Awaiting me there was this book.
Reading it, I was carried away - and as I reread The Great Lover, I vowed to memorize the entire poem.
I did. As we left Frisco the next day I proudly declaimed the poem (being roundly dissed by my carmates)!
I still remember parts of Brooke's long lead-in to the list of things he loved in his short life:
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,
And all dear names men use to cheat despair
For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear
Our hearts at random down the dark of life.
On April 23, 1915, the young Rupert Brooke died of blood poisoning - ironically, on an army hospital ship anchored in Greece BEFORE the wholesale slaughter of the Battle of Gallipoli.
His lucky stars had cut his brief life short and steered him safely away from a much more cruel and senseless death.
And I’m sure this great young poet - whom I’ve always thought was the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s lamented young friend in the Waves who met with an untimely end - has gone to his Blest Reward.
For Woolf’s young friend, whose life was such a legacy of gladness to all the characters in The Waves, lived his short life forever Reaching for a Star...
A Star that was now forever falling into a blood-red sea outside the humid port holes of a Red Cross ship off the lonely Turkish shore.
December 1, 2021
A consequence of my student loan, proximity of second hand book shops and lack of self control. Felt special to read this in my room where he would have lived just down the road, and Granchester was a personal favourite.
December 30, 2018
I was originally gifted an earlier edition of this by my Grandfather before February 1977, and fell in love with the war poets, as I had a keen interest in both Literature and History both of which have remained with me through my life. I find the poetry profound, sometimes senstive but not sentimental. As with so much of the literature that came out from the Great War it should never be lost as a reminder to all of us of the waste of young lives.
March 18, 2019
Occasionally we all need reminding of what life is all about ... In his short life, Rupert Brooke was older than his years. His wisdom is thought provoking, always real, no matter how often one returns to his pages. Never did a older man speak more fluidly and gentler than Brooke. His river still runs as fresh and clear as when he first dipped his toes into the brooke.
May 18, 2025
【Pagan, But Not Anti-Christian / Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke】
This cheap worn-out version of "Collected Poems" shows us how Rupert Brooke is out of date in the literary world, against my preference to this type of innocent yearning for "somewhere else," if not Orientalism or called anything by those labels.
--She was wrinkled and huge and hideous? She was our mother. She was lustful and lewd? --but a God; we had none other. (P13, Seaside)
So I, from paint, stone, tale, and rhyme,
Stuffed love's infinity,
And sucked all lovers of all time
To rarity ecstasy. (P28, Mummia)
Of course, it's not only romanticising the unknown worlds to the poet. He was all aware of his incorrectness, and the narrative of keen nostalgia hits home.
No fool to heave luxurious sighs
For the woods and hills that I never knew.
The more excellent way's yet mine! And you (P42, Paralysis)
However, he falls into clichéd expressions full of colours but superficially embroidered when he actually visited and experienced the world outside (such as Tahiti and even the frontline of WW1).
Still, he deserves our great care when he wrote about what was so familiar with him, like this:
I'll think of Love in books, Love without end;
Women with child, content; and old men sleeping; (P74, The Busy Heart)
There are some people who can't see anything as a present thing, but try to understand them by having them in brain and think over on them all with some fading perception. Brooke might've been one of them. The more he sounds sweet, the more he wakes up from the drowsy anaesthesia of self-indulgence.
It does but double the heart-ache
When I wake, when I wake. (P92, Sometimes Even Now)
This cheap worn-out version of "Collected Poems" shows us how Rupert Brooke is out of date in the literary world, against my preference to this type of innocent yearning for "somewhere else," if not Orientalism or called anything by those labels.
--She was wrinkled and huge and hideous? She was our mother. She was lustful and lewd? --but a God; we had none other. (P13, Seaside)
So I, from paint, stone, tale, and rhyme,
Stuffed love's infinity,
And sucked all lovers of all time
To rarity ecstasy. (P28, Mummia)
Of course, it's not only romanticising the unknown worlds to the poet. He was all aware of his incorrectness, and the narrative of keen nostalgia hits home.
No fool to heave luxurious sighs
For the woods and hills that I never knew.
The more excellent way's yet mine! And you (P42, Paralysis)
However, he falls into clichéd expressions full of colours but superficially embroidered when he actually visited and experienced the world outside (such as Tahiti and even the frontline of WW1).
Still, he deserves our great care when he wrote about what was so familiar with him, like this:
I'll think of Love in books, Love without end;
Women with child, content; and old men sleeping; (P74, The Busy Heart)
There are some people who can't see anything as a present thing, but try to understand them by having them in brain and think over on them all with some fading perception. Brooke might've been one of them. The more he sounds sweet, the more he wakes up from the drowsy anaesthesia of self-indulgence.
It does but double the heart-ache
When I wake, when I wake. (P92, Sometimes Even Now)
Read
August 11, 2025I admit that if it weren't for Walter de la Mare, I don't know if I would have ever felt the urge to read Rupert Brooke's poems. After reading this collection, I understand part of the influence he had on de la Mare's prose and fiction, especially through the moodiness and, at times, mystery conveyed through a sort of eerie atmosphere. Yet all these complex, darker truths are revealed in such a way that they inspire a greater awe at being alive, however briefly on this earth, and at being, ultimately, part of these mysteries too.
Some of the first poems in this collection, at least on first reading, felt a bit repetitive and predictable, especially with the recurring motif of death as the conclusion of either love or life. Perhaps it’s because I’ve read so much Swinburne and other decadent poets that the repeated implication of death as part of the mysteries of life and love struck me - in its execution, not as a notion - as something of a cheap artifice.
And then… as I read on, the selection grew richer and more moving. I found myself pausing often, marking many favourites, until I finally ended up weeping at The Great Lover. I also loved The Night Journey, and other atmospheric poems like Blue Evening, The Voice, Dining Room Tea, Hauntings and many others.
Some of the first poems in this collection, at least on first reading, felt a bit repetitive and predictable, especially with the recurring motif of death as the conclusion of either love or life. Perhaps it’s because I’ve read so much Swinburne and other decadent poets that the repeated implication of death as part of the mysteries of life and love struck me - in its execution, not as a notion - as something of a cheap artifice.
And then… as I read on, the selection grew richer and more moving. I found myself pausing often, marking many favourites, until I finally ended up weeping at The Great Lover. I also loved The Night Journey, and other atmospheric poems like Blue Evening, The Voice, Dining Room Tea, Hauntings and many others.
October 15, 2022
I'm not one of those people that really gets poetry but some guy writing about angsty love and imagining the life of a fish just speaks to me so yeah. Poetry is a very personal projection of emotion, more abstract than prose but more verbose than song so for the uninitiated like myself, we have to connect to the material more to grasp the power of this medium.
Anyway, I love this collection. It feels raw and unfiltered and rather than having to look between lines and dig up meaning, it washed over me without any work on my part so I guess this is perfect for lazy readers like me.
Anyway, I love this collection. It feels raw and unfiltered and rather than having to look between lines and dig up meaning, it washed over me without any work on my part so I guess this is perfect for lazy readers like me.
October 9, 2022
I managed to buy a 1922 edition of his first collection of poems which were published shortly after his death and that collection is breathtaking. It evokes so many emotions and leaves you completely breathless. Hauntingly stunning.
January 15, 2018
"The Fish". Stunning.
January 23, 2023
"Song" was unexpectedly nice, and "The Voice" terribly relatable for an introvert with misophonia.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews