The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke - Brooke Rupert

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manner of English poetic style. So, in many minor ways, he shuffled contrast and climax, and the like, adept in the handling of poetic rhetoric that he had come to be; but in three ways he was conspicuously successful in his art.

      The first of these—they are all in the larger forms of art—is the dramatic sonnet, by which I do not mean merely a sonnet in dialogue or advancing by simple contrast; but one in which there may be these things, but also there is a tragic reversal or its equivalent. Not to consider it too curiously, take "The Hill". This sonnet is beautiful in action and diction; its eloquence speeds it on with a lift; the situation is the very crest of life; then—

      "We shall go down with unreluctant tread,

       Rose-crowned into the darkness! … Proud we were,

       And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.

      —And then you suddenly cried and turned away."

      The dramatic sonnet in English has not gone beyond that, for beauty, for brevity, for tragic effect—nor, I add, for unspoken loyalty to reality. Reality was, perhaps, what he most dearly wished for; here he achieved it. In many another sonnet he won the laurel; but if I were to venture to choose, it is in the dramatic handling of the sonnet that he is most individual and characteristic.

      The second great success of his genius, formally considered, lay in the narrative idyl, either in the Miltonic way of flashing bits of English country landscape before the eye, as in "Grantchester", or by applying essentially the same method to the water world of fishes or the South Sea world, both on a philosophic background. These are all master poems of a kaleidoscopic beauty and charm, where the brief pictures play in and out of a woven veil of thought, irony, mood, with a delightful intellectual pleasuring. He thoroughly enjoys doing the poetical magic. Such bits of English retreats or Pacific paradises, so full of idyllic charm, exquisite in image and movement, are among the rarest of poetic treasures. The thought of Milton and of Marvell only adds an old world charm to the most modern of the works of the Muses. What lightness of touch, what ease of movement, what brilliancy of hue! What vivacity throughout! Even in "Retrospect", what actuality!

      And the third success is what I should call the "melange". That is, the method of indiscrimination by which he gathers up experience, and pours it out again in language, with full disregard of its relative values. His good taste saves him from what in another would be shipwreck, but this indifference to values, this apparent lack of selection in material, while at times it gives a huddled flow, more than anything else "modernizes" the verse. It yields, too, an effect of abundant vitality, and it makes facile the change from grave to gay and the like. The "melange", as I call it, is rather an innovation in English verse, and to be found only rarely. It exists, however; and especially it was dear to Keats in his youth. It is by excellent taste, and by style, that the poet here overcomes its early difficulties.

      In these three formal ways, besides in minor matters, it appears to me that Rupert Brooke, judged by the most orthodox standards, had succeeded in poetry.

      III

      But in his first notes, if I may indulge my private taste, I find more of the intoxication of the god. These early poems are the lyrical cries and luminous flares of a dawn, no doubt; but they are incarnate of youth. Capital among them is "Blue Evening". It is original and complete. In its whispering embraces of sense, in the terror of seizure of the spirit, in the tranquil euthanasia of the end by the touch of speechless beauty, it seems to me a true symbol of life whole and entire. It is beautiful in language and feeling, with an extraordinary clarity and rise of power; and, above all, though rare in experience, it is real. A young poet's poem; but it has a quality never captured by perfect art. A poem for poets, no doubt; but that is the best kind. So, too, the poem, entitled "Sleeping Out", charms me and stirs me with its golden clangors and crying flames of emotion as it mounts up to "the white one flame", to "the laughter and the lips of light". It is like a holy Italian picture—remote, inaccessible, alone. The "white flame" seems to have had a mystic meaning to the boy; it occurs repeatedly. And another poem—not to make too long a story of my private enthusiasms—"Ante Aram"—wakes all my classical blood—

      "voice more sweet than the far plaint of viols is,

       Or the soft moan of any grey-eyed lute player."

      But these things are arcana.

      IV

      There is a grave in Scyros, amid the white and pinkish marble of the isle,

      the wild thyme and the poppies, near the green and blue waters.

      There Rupert Brooke was buried. Thither have gone the thoughts

      of his countrymen, and the hearts of the young especially.

      It will long be so. For a new star shines in the English heavens.

       G. E. W.

       Beverly, Mass., October, 1915.

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      Here in the dark, O heart;

       Alone with the enduring Earth, and Night,

       And Silence, and the warm strange smell of clover;

       Clear-visioned, though it break you; far apart

       From the dead best, the dear and old delight;

       Throw down your dreams of immortality,

       O faithful, O foolish lover!

       Here's peace for you, and surety; here the one

       Wisdom—the truth!—"All day the good glad sun

       Showers love and labour on you, wine and song;

       The greenwood laughs, the wind blows, all day long

       Till night." And night ends all things.

       Then shall be

       No lamp relumed in heaven, no voices crying,

       Or changing lights, or dreams and forms that hover!

       (And, heart, for all your sighing,

       That gladness and those tears are over, over. …)

       And has the truth brought no new hope at all,

       Heart, that you're weeping yet for Paradise?

       Do they still whisper, the old weary cries?

       "'MID YOUTH AND SONG, FEASTING AND CARNIVAL,

       THROUGH LAUGHTER, THROUGH THE ROSES, AS OF OLD

       COMES DEATH, ON SHADOWY AND RELENTLESS FEET,

       DEATH, UNAPPEASABLE BY PRAYER OR GOLD;

       DEATH IS THE END, THE END!"

       Proud, then, clear-eyed and laughing, go to greet

       Death as a friend!

       Exile of immortality, strongly wise,

       Strain through the dark with undesirous eyes

       To what may lie beyond it. Sets your star,

       O heart, for ever! Yet, behind the night,

       Waits for the great unborn, somewhere afar,

       Some white tremendous daybreak. And the light,

       Returning, shall give back the golden hours,

       Ocean a windless level, Earth a lawn

       Spacious and full of sunlit dancing-places,

       And laughter, and music, and, among the flowers,

       The gay child-hearts of men, and the child-faces

      

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