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       III. The Dead

       IV. The Dead

       V. The Soldier

       The Treasure

       The South Seas

       Tiare Tahiti

       Retrospect

       The Great Lover

       Heaven

       Doubts

       There's Wisdom in Women

       He Wonders Whether to Praise or to Blame Her

       A Memory (From a sonnet-sequence)

       One Day

       Waikiki

       Hauntings

       Clouds

       Mutability

       Other Poems

       The Busy Heart

       Love

       Unfortunate

       The Chilterns

       Home

       The Night Journey

       Song

       Beauty and Beauty

       The Way That Lovers Use

       Mary and Gabriel

       The Funeral of Youth: Threnody

       Grantchester

       The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

       Fafaia

       Appendix

       Fragment

       Fragment on Painters

       The True Beatitude (Bouts-Rimes)

       [End of Poems.]

       Rupert Brooke: A Biographical Note

       Addendum

       In Memory of Rupert Brooke

       Rupert Brooke

       To Rupert Brooke

Introduction

       Table of Contents

      I

      Rupert Brooke was both fair to see and winning in his ways. There was at the first contact both bloom and charm; and most of all there was life. To use the word his friends describe him by, he was "vivid". This vitality, though manifold in expression, is felt primarily in his sensations—surprise mingled with delight—

      "One after one, like tasting a sweet food."

      This is life's "first fine rapture". It makes him patient to name over those myriad things (each of which seems like a fresh discovery) curious but potent, 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 exquisite words; and he is captivated by the multiple brevity of these vignettes of sense, keen, momentary, ecstatic with the morning dip of youth in the wonderful stream. The poem is a catalogue of vital sensations and "dear names" as well. "All these have been my loves."

      The spring of these emotions is the natural body, but it sends pulsations far into the spirit. The feeling rises in direct observation, but it is soon aware of the "outlets of the sky". He sees objects practically unrelated, and links them in strings; or he sees them pictorially; or, he sees pictures immersed as it were in an atmosphere of thought. When the process is complete, the thought suggests the picture and is its origin. Then the Great Lover revisits the bottom of the monstrous world, and imaginatively and thoughtfully recreates that strange under-sea, whose glooms and gleams and muds are well known to him as a strong and delighted swimmer; or, at the last, drifts through the dream of a South Sea lagoon, still with a philosophical question in his mouth. Yet one can hardly speak of "completion". These are real first flights. What we have in this volume is not so much a work of art as an artist in his birth trying the wings of genius.

      The poet loves his new-found element. He clings to mortality; to life, not thought; or, as he puts it, to the concrete—let the abstract "go pack!" "There's little comfort in the wise," he ends. But in the unfolding of his precocious spirit,

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