From the archive, 27 April 1915: Editorial: A Poet’s Death

The death of Rupert Brooke leaves us with a miserable sense of waste and futility, yet it is impossible to withhold even the most precious personalities

The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke

First world war poet Rupert Brooke, who died in April 1915. Photograph: PA

The news that RUPERT BROOKE has died on a French hospital ship and been buried at Lemnos will bring deep regret to those who care for literature and will touch those who only knew him as a gallant young poet gone to the war. He was not a warlike poet, but one of niceties and delicate apprehensions, of moods and impressions; with sympathetic fancifulness he would penetrate to the consciousness of a fish in the cool stream. It is difficult to imagine the process of adjustment by which such a man would fit himself for the savage blatancies, the shrieks and roars of war, and hardly less difficult, perhaps, to associate him with all the straitnesses of uniform and drill.

But our poets are deeply of the nation, and RUPERT BROOKE answered the call like thousands of other young men. It is said that he expected to die - perhaps most imaginative men who go to the war expect that, - and yet he looked unshrinkingly at the prospect. He was one of the four poets who issue their “New Numbers” from a Gloucestershire village, and in the last of “New Numbers” BROOKE had a series of sonnets on the war that rank among the few fine things provoked by it. His death leaves us with a miserable sense of waste and futility, and yet, while we begrudge him, we know that it is impossible to withhold even the most precious personalities; wives and mothers have learnt that. We are told that he was strong in conviction on his country’s side and with “a heart devoid of hate.”

RUPERT BROOKE
(From a Cambridge Correspondent.)

The death at Lemnos by sunstroke of Rupert Brooke, one of the most promising of our younger poets, will be felt nowhere more than in Cambridge. He was senior to me at King’s by two or three years, but he would appear now and then in Cambridge, and I remember him reading a paper at one of the societies, the light shining on his gold hair and the room hushed to hear his voice, which was soft, at times inaudible, and would utter a literary effrontery without the slightest change in tone. No one looked more the poet than he, and an epigram written by a Cambridge poetess, beginning, “O young Apollo, golden-haired” (I forget the next line) and ending –

Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life,

gives one some idea of the outward and inward impression he made upon his contemporaries. He loved his Cambridge passionately, and in his poem on the Old Vicarage at Grantchester he gave expression to his passion in words which are known by heart by every Cambridge-lover, and must have been murmured I don’t know how many times in summer twilight, on the upper river. That his death means a very real loss to English letters will hardly be denied by those who knew his work.

This is an edited extract, read on for more

Rupert Brooke died of blood poisoning on 23 April 1915, on his way to Gallipoli, and was buried on the island of Skyros.