The Poetry of Rupert Brooke
Reading edition
Margaret C. Anderson
Poems, by Rupert Brooke. (Sidgwick and Jackson, London.)
The unusual thing about Rupert Brooke—the young Oxford don whose poetry is just finding its way in this country—is that he has graduated from the French school without having taken a course in decadence. The result is a type of English poetry minus those qualities we think of as typical of “the British mind” and plus those that stand as the highest expression of the French spirit. There is nothing of self-conscious reserve about Mr. Brooke; and yet it is not so obvious a quality as his frank, unashamed revealment that places him definitely with the French type. It is rather a matter of form—that quality of saying a thing in the most economic way it can be said, of finding the simple and the inevitable word. Mr. Brooke stands very happily between a poet like Alfred Noyes, in whom one rarely finds that careful selection, and the esthetes whose agony in that direction becomes monotonous. For example, in the first sonnet of this collection:
Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire Of watching you; and swing me suddenly Into the shade and loneliness and mire Of the last land! There, waiting patiently, One day, I think, I’ll feel a cool wind blowing, See a slow light across the Stygian tide, And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing, And tremble. And I shall know that you have died, And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream, Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host, Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam— Most individual and bewildering ghost!— And turn, and toss your brown delightful head Amusedly, among the ancient Dead.
There are about eighteen words in this one sonnet chosen with infinite pains; and yet the effect of the whole is quite unlabored—an effect of spontaneity reduced to its simplest terms.
Perhaps the point can be made more emphatically by a miscellaneous quotation of single lines, because the poignancy of Rupert Brooke’s phrasing leaves me in a torment of inexpressiveness, forced to quote him rather than talk about him. Here are a few: “Like hills at noon or sunlight on a tree”; “And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky”; “The soft moan of any grey-eyed lute-player”; “Some gaunt eventual limit of our light”; “Red darkness of the heart of roses”; “And long noon in the hot calm places”; “My wild sick blasphemous prayer”; “Further than laughter goes, or tears, further than dreaming”; “Against the black and muttering trees”; “And quietness crept up the hill”; “When your swift hair is quiet in death”; “Savage forgotten drowsy hymns”; “And dance as dust before the sun”; “The swift whir of terrible wings”; “Like flies on the cold flesh”; “Clear against the unheeding sky”; “So high a beauty in the air”; “Amazed with sorrow”; “Haggard with virtue”; “Frozen smoke”; “Mist-garlanded,” and a thousand other things that somehow have a fashion of striking twelve. There’s a long poem about a fish, beginning
In a cool curving world he lies And ripples with dark ecstasies.
that flashes through every tone of the stream’s “drowned colour” from “blue brilliant from dead starless skies” to “the myriad hues that lie between darkness and darkness.” And there’s one about Menelaus and Helen containing this description:
High sat white Helen, lonely and serene. He had not remembered that she was so fair, And that her neck curved down in such a way;
The simplicity of that last line—but what a picture it is!
The important things about Mr. Brooke, however—and of course this should have been said in the first paragraph—are his sense of life and his feeling for nature. Of the first it might be said that he is strong and radiant and sure—and at the same time reverently impotent. The Hill, which I like better than anything in this collection, will illustrate:
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass. You said, “Through glory and ecstasy we pass; Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still, When we are old, are old....” “And when we die All’s over that is ours; and life burns on Through other lovers, other lips,” said I, —“Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!” “We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here. Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!” we said; “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.
Everything in it—with the exception of “kissed the lovely grass,” which might easily be spared—is fine; “with unreluctant tread Rose-crowned into the darkness!” is vivid with beauty; and when the simple dignity of “such brave true things to say” has swung you to its great height, the drop in that sudden last line comes with the most moving wistfulness. There are several poems, too long to quote here, which show Mr. Brooke’s affinity with the outdoors; but perhaps even five lines from one of them will suggest it:
Then from the sad west turning wearily, I saw the pines against the white north sky, Very beautiful, and still, and bending over Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky And there was peace in them....
Not long ago I asked a poet in whose judgment I have a profound belief, to read these poems of Rupert Brooke’s and give me his opinion. After looking at two or three he said he was afraid he wasn’t going to like them, but the next day he reported that he wished to retract, making the magnificent concession that “some of Brooke’s moods are healthy!” Of course there are a number of things in this volume that can easily be interpreted as unhealthy or repulsive, like the Wagner:
Creeps in half wanton, half asleep, One with a fat wide hairless face. He likes love music that is cheap; Likes women in a crowded place; And wants to hear the noise they’re making. His heavy eyelids droop half-over, Great pouches swing beneath his eyes. He listens, thinks himself the lover, Heaves from his stomach wheezy sighs; He likes to feel his heart’s a-breaking. The music swells. His gross legs quiver. His little lips are bright with slime. The music swells. The women shiver, And all the while, in perfect time His pendulous stomach hangs a-shaking.
But it seems something more than that to me. As an attack on German emotionalism—however unjustly, from my point of view, through Wagner—the poem struck me as an exercise of extraordinary cleverness. I don’t know that anyone has ever said so effectively the things that ought be said about that type of emotion which feeds not upon life but, inversely, upon emotion.
Mr. Brooke’s pictures have much of the quality of Böcklin’s. That first sonnet can be imagined in the same tone values as Böcklin’s wonderful Isle of the Dead, and the closing lines of Victory need the same medium:
Down the supernal roads, With plumes a-tossing, purple flags far flung, Rank upon rank, unbridled, unforgiving, Thundered the black battalions of the Gods.
Seaside needs an artist like Leon Dabo:
Swiftly out from the friendly lilt of the band, The crowd’s good laughter, the loved eyes of men, I am drawn nightward; I must turn again Where, down beyond the low untrodden strand, There curves and glimmers outward to the unknown The old unquiet ocean. All the shade Is rife with magic and movement. I stray alone Here on the edge of silence, half afraid, Waiting a sign. In the deep heart of me The sullen waters swell towards the moon, And all my tides set seaward. From inland Leaps a gay fragment of some mocking tune, That tinkles and laughs and fades along the sand, And dies between the seawall and the sea.
How perfect those last three lines are! How skilful, in painting the sea, to concentrate upon something from inland, making the ocean twice as old and vast and unquiet because of that little tinkling tune.
One will find in Rupert Brooke various kinds of things, but never attitudinizing and never insincerity. He is one of the most important of those young Englishmen who are doing so much for modern poetry. He is essentially a poet’s poet, and yet his feet are deep in the common soil. Swinburne would have liked him, but the significant thing is that Whitman would, too. There are several poems I have not mentioned that Whitman would have loved.