This time of year, I re-post the series The War Poets. Just some of the men and women who served on the front line on all sides of the conflict who fought, died or returned scarred by their experiences.
They are going out at 4.a.m each morning my time, which is the coldest before the dawn, and as they would have woken in the trenches to prepare for another day of horror, bravery and sacrifice.
We often dismiss the words of the young due to their lack of life experience. However there was no such lack in the lives of the youthful poets who experienced the dreadful events of the First and Second World War. Today a poet whose work I first read as a teenager in an old poetry book I found on the shelves in our home. It had a profound effect on me and the way I viewed conflict.
Here is the podcast for the post.
Rupert Brooke
Poetry has played an enormous role in our history particularly when telling the stories of heroes and heroines through the ages. Very popular during Victorian times, verse was used prolifically to proclaim love, poke fun at politicians and big wigs as well as to honour bravery in service to Queen and Country. Poetry was as widely read as novels and in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, a number of our most well-known poets were born producing some of our most loved verses.
I am by no means a poetry expert but I have found that verse is very individual and that you enjoy those pieces which reflect events and emotions in your own life.
For example; as a teenager I found a book of Rupert Brooke’s poems on a bookshelf at home and there were one or two at that age that I understood and enjoyed. However, as I have got older and revisited his work and other poets, I realise that my own life’s experience enables me to appreciate their work in a more profound way. Although Rupert Brooks is best known for his war poems such as The Soldier, there are others that also reflect his experiences of love and life beautifully, despite his own youth.
Like many of the poets of the first part of the 20th century Rupert Brooke was caught between the Victorian strait laced puritanism and the liberal 20’s. He was a bit of a jack the lad, considered an Adonis by both men and women. In his short life he loved both; mainly those within the growing social and intellectual societies such as the Fabians.
Anyway a little biography of this talented young poet.
Rupert Chawner Brooke was born on 3rd August 1887 second son to William Parker Brooke a housemaster at Rugby school and his wife Ruth Cotterill. Rupert attended both the preparatory and main schools before going up to King’s College, Cambridge where he studied the classics, somewhat badly, as he was more interested in literature and acting. At the end of his third year he turned his attention to literature and moved out of Cambridge to Grantchester. Here he and his circle of friends embraced the country life whilst developing interest politics and in the growing socialist reforms as members of the “Fabian Society”.
In 1911 Rupert spent time in Munich learning German before returning to Grantchester to work on his fellowship at King’s. At the same time he completed his first volume of Poems which in the next 20 years was reprinted 37 times at around 100,000 copies.
In 1913 Rupert was finally awarded his Fellowship at King’s but did not take it up immediately choosing to travel to New York, Canada, San Francisco and New Zealand before settling on Tahiti; living with a Tahitian beauty Taatamata.
However, running out of money and suffering from a bad infection from coral poisoning, Rupert returned to England in mid-1914. He took up his fellowship at King’s but his idealism gained new focus with the onset of War. On September 15th he applied and was accepted for a commission in the Royal Naval Division and embarked with his battalion to defend Antwerp from the German Advance.
The War Years
Antwerp fell to the Germans and the battalion returned to England and over the next three months Brooke’s company re-equipped and despite a period of illness Rupert embarked on a ship to the Dardanelles on February 27th 1915. Over the next two months the battalion spent time in Malta, Lemnos and Eygpt as they attempted to reach the front.
Rupert suffered another bout of ill health including sunstroke and dysentery. Senior officers, aware of his growing fame as both a poet and potential influential politician, decided he should be kept away from the front lines, offering him a staff job that he refused.
On Saturday 10th April 1915, Brooke’s troopship left Port Said for Lemnos via the Island of Skyros. They arrived there on Saturday 17th April, The officers and men landed on Skyros and conducted exercises but on 20th April Rupert Brooke fell seriously ill with blood poisoning. His system already weakened by several bouts of infection he could not overcome this latest illness, and on April 23rd he died aboard ship aged 27.
He had commented on the beauty and peace of a particular olive grove on the island and was buried there by his fellow officers amongst the scent of flowering sage.
Image Sherrill Schell
The poem The Soldier has stood the test of time and is as evocative today as it was nearly 100 years ago. Especially as we prepare to honour the young men and women who have served and died. Not only for our own countries, but all those in any conflict around the world.
1914 V: 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.
Buy Rupert Brooke complete works : Amazon UK – And: Amazon US
Find out more about Rupert Brooke: Wikipedia
Thank you for dropping in today… Sally.
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