1 RUPERT BROOKE 1887 1915 Personal qualities Regarded

1. RUPERT BROOKE (1887 – 1915)

Personal qualities � � � Regarded the war as opportunity for an ennobling experience Created a lot of controversy through his writing Young man of noble qualities, Cambridgeeducated, excellent in classical subjects and sports A man of admirable intellect and personal beauty Political figures like Edward Marsh and Winston Churchill were among his friends

War experience � � � Brooke originally joined the Artists’ Rifles when England declared war As a member of Anson Battery he was present at Britain’s failed attempt to save Antwerp While at home on Christmas leave 1914, he wrote five sonnet his current reputation is based on The sonnets were immediately published in December 1914 Brooke died in April 1915 on the island of Skyros due to blood poisoning

Instrument of propaganda � � � Brooke was immensely, almost frantically popular (intellectual power, good looks, noble spirit) Three days after his death, London Times ran an article by Winston Churchill, who declared Rupert Brooke a symbol of England’s patriotic youth In this way, Churchill helped Brooke to a posthumous legendary status and made him an instrument of war propaganda

� � � His poetry was very Georgian in its style and lyricism; its perspective very personalized It is unlikely that this would have changed had he lived long enough to witness the last years of the war In fact, he saw enough of the war’s misery and bloodshed when he witnessed the fall of Antwerp to the Germans, which only strengthened his English patriotism and determination to oppose such evils

Examples Rupert Brooke, ‘The Dead’ Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been, Their sons, they gave, their immortality. Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our death, Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain. Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage; And Nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage.

Rupert Brooke, ‘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. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Study questions � � � How does Brooke harness and whip up the British patriotic sentiment? Why and how does he glorify sacrifice in ‘The Dead’? What does ‘England’ signify in ‘The Soldier’? Discuss the images of immortality the two poems offer to compensate for the loss of young lives. Both poems are firmly embedded in the tradition of sonnet-writing. How does this fact influence the ideas and emotions the poems put forth?