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 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.”