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Hello dear readers -

This is a brief post, but I couldn’t let this day go by without honoring one of the poets who has helped shape my understanding of the Great War (1914-1918). Today marks the 104th anniversary of the death of one of England’s brilliant war poets, Rupert Chawner Brooke (b. 8 August 1887, d. 23 April 1915). If you haven’t read the works of Rupert Brooke, take a moment to find them online (or order an anthology here). Poetry Foundation offers an excellent biography and selection of Brooke’s most famous poems if you don’t feel like committing to purchasing an anthology.

Rupert Brooke, as quoted by William Butler Yeats, “the handsomest man in England.”

Rupert Brooke was only twenty-seven when he tragically perished two days before he was to embark on what would become the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign in the Dardanelles. He, like many young men of his generation in Great Britain, believed it to be his duty to country to volunteer as a soldier during the Great War. He enlisted in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as soon as the conflict began in 1914, despite already having started a career as a talented writer and poet after he completed his education at Cambridge. He had gained a following amongst Great Britain’s literary elite of the early twentieth century - the writers Virginia Woolf and William Butler Yeats considered him a friend. Brooke, however, decided his duty to his country was more important than continuing his writing career.

That is not to say Brooke stopped writing while in the navy. Brooke’s most famous works emerged during the war. His poems reflected the feelings most men held when they first enlisted during the beginning of the war - optimistic and patriotic. Great Britain believed the war would be over by Christmas of 1914, but of course, as we all know, this was not the outcome. The war dragged on, and the soldiers who believed it to be their duty to serve did serve…knee deep in the dirty, rat-infested trenches of the Western Front. They became disillusioned with the war - the later war poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen would write about their hatred for the conflict because they, unlike Brooke, witnessed most of the brutality of 1916 and 1917.

Brooke did not share in Sassoon’s and Owen’s experiences. He died before the violence and bloodshed of the Great War peaked. He was proud to be a soldier; he was honored to die on behalf of his beloved England. These sentiments are especially reflected in the “Nineteen-Fourteen” series of sonnets. The most famous of the five sonnets is arguably “The Soldier,” in which Brooke is perfectly content with dying for England, because England, personified as his “mother,” helped raise him. England was responsible for allowing him to mature and become a man. Brooke, if he died, only wanted to be remembered as one of England’s cherished sons, buried in “some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England” in gratitude for the role England played in his maturation.

Brooke’s death wish was indeed fulfilled - after acquiring a mosquito bite when stationed in Egypt, he became ill with sepsis after the navy headed off to the Aegean Sea en route to Gallipoli in April of 1915. Brooke died on 23 April 1915 on the Greek island of Skyros, and was buried by his fellow soldiers in an olive grove…the same soldiers who would meet their demise at Gallipoli just a few days later.

That Greek olive grove will forever be a piece of England now that his body and spirit are buried there.

Here’s to you, Rupert Brooke. May you continue to rest in peace, “under an English heaven.”

Before I end this piece, I leave you with Brooke’s last written poem. It was an early draft created just before the Gallipoli campaign, and remains unpolished and incomplete - it was appropriately titled “Fragment.” As much as I love “The Soldier,” I am haunted by this last piece of his, because I truly do believe he was already foreshadowing his death. That, however, is subject to your own interpretation.

I strayed about the deck, an hour, to-night
Under a cloudy moonless sky; and peeped
In at the windows, watched my friends at table,
Or playing cards, or standing in the doorway,
Or coming out into the darkness. Still
No one could see me.

I would have thought of them
—Heedless, within a week of battle—in pity,
Pride in their strength and in the weight and firmness
And link’d beauty of bodies, and pity that
This gay machine of splendour ’ld soon be broken,
Thought little of, pashed, scattered. …

Only, always,
I could but see them—against the lamplight—pass
Like coloured shadows, thinner than filmy glass,
Slight bubbles, fainter than the wave’s faint light,
That broke to phosphorus out in the night,
Perishing things and strange ghosts—soon to die
To other ghosts—this one, or that, or I.

Many happy returns,

-Kate