Flower of England

...A potentially explosive situation," Lehmann forewarns...

...Britain's Victorian economy was in ruins and the society of Edward VII at an end, but the memory of what England had been remained steadfast in the minds of its people Beneath a medallion of Brooke on a memorial plaque in the Rugby School Chapel there appears "The Soldier," one of his most popular and eloquent works, which begins "If I should die, think only this of me /That there's some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England " Those moving words were written before Brooke resolved his initial uncertain response to the War by finally condemning it...

...But by all accounts Brooke must be considered a minor literary figure Perhaps most widely known as a "war poet," his work pales beside that of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, and seems curiously old-fashioned for having been produced only a decade before the publication of The Waste Land If the Easter preceding his death he was nearly canonized m St Paul's Cathedral when Dean Inge compared his sonnet, "The Soldier," to the vision of Isaiah, and ventured to think Brooke would "take rank with our great poets," that is because the spirit he came to represent loomed larger than the man and his talent As a result, complained a long time friend, Gwen Raverat, one somehow never got the feeling "of his being a human being at all ". Drawing up on previously unpublished letters that were either unavailable at the time of Christopher Hassall's official biography of Brooke, or deleted by Sir Geoffrey Keynes in his selection, John Lehmann in The Strange Destiny of Rupert Brooke sets out to dispel "the magnetic effect" that Brooke's charm and good looks had on his contemporaries, font "blinded them so often, not merely to the imperfections of his poetry, but also to the darker side of his character " What Lehmann gives us is a profile that is at times sympathetic and at other times sensational, yet always revealing, of the man behind the myth of the poet-soldier-hero "The life of the poet," Brooke prophesied in a 1906 manuscript note, "is made up of tragedies they begin with an infatuation and end with a sonnet sequence " Rupert Chawner Brooke was born on August 3, 1887, to a public schoolteacher and an independently minded woman who had wished for a daughter Of delicate health and prone to infection, he had a feminine, almost androgynous beauty, and bore a striking resemblance, both in physical constitution and psychological makeup, to his mother (Poet and friend Frances Cornford sensed that deep inside was a strong strain of puritanism, which in fact later surfaced in Brooke's obsession with cleanliness ). At age nine, while visiting relatives, Rupert discovered poem, by 10 he was writing verses of his own Soon alter beginning school at Rugby the next year, he became friends with a cousin, James Strachey, and subsequently met James' elder brother, Lytton To James, "the markings of glamor were already there", to others, Brooke remained strangely aloof His Rugby classmates nicknamed him "Oyster ". By his last year of school it was decided he would go to Cambridge, rather than Oxford as had been planned There Lytton Strachey recruited Brooke for the elitist and clandestine Conversazione Society, known as Apostles, whose members included G E Moore, his friend Geoffrey Keynes' older brother Maynard, Leonard Woolf, and E M Forster "When I first saw him," Woolf wrote, "I thought to myself 'That is exactly what Adonis must have looked like m the eyes of Aphrodite '" In addition, though, Woolf suspected a cruel, even ruthless streak in Brooke, and Forster emphasized the "essentially hard" side of his character...

...Churchill's sentiments triggered a wave of public lamentation for the poet whom W B Yeats had called "the most beautiful young man in England "Henry James wept at the news In a letter to Lady Otto line Morrell, D H Lawrence apotheosized " I first heard of him as a Greek god Bright Phoebus smote him down It is all in the saga O God...

...The purity of sentiment m the 1914 sonnets represented the one last ideal Brooke held on to when all else seemed to have collapsed The wheel had come full circle...

...They endure nevertheless, not so much for their artistic technique, but because they are the ultimate expression of undying loyalty born of the idealism of youth Brooke, as the historian George Dangerfield has observed, became the representative of all that had been best in England at a time when England itself was lost, the embodiment of English youth and hope when liberal England had died...

...to Rupert Insecure about his own sexuality and loathing the thought of Ka's relations with Lamb, he flew into a jealous rage and desperately begged her to marry him Ka refused, but she agreed to accompany him for a while on a trip to Munich...

...The powers of the libido in the early poem "Lust," became the subject of self-mockery in "The Great Lover," where the object of desire is not sexual fulfillment but the intimacy of material goods, "the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon smooth away trouble, and the rough male kiss of blankets ". Brooke's criticism during this period, particularly two pieces on John Donne, reveals a subtle, analytical mind at work and anticipates the famous remarks of T.S Eliotin "The Metaphysical Poets " His essays on art and travel demonstrate an almost intuitive knowledge of painting and the ability to authentically recreate a first impression So we begin to see Brooke once he has himself seen through his poetic melancholy and boyish naivete and confronted reality...

...In late December 1911 Brooke, worn out from having just published his first book of poems and completed his thesis on the Elizabethan drama, went down to Lulworth on the Dorsetshire coast to join some Cambridge friends for a reading party At his suggestion, this was to consist of War and Peace, Milton, Donne, possibly some Browning, Ben Jonson, and "a little Keats " Brooke had discovered earlier that Lulworth was the last place Keats had set foot in England before his death in Italy Both Ka and Lamb were at Lulworth, and one Saturday evening they disappeared for a walk by the seashore On Sunday, Ka confessed her love for Lamb...

...Meanwhile, Brooke's acquaintance with Ka, a plain looking country girl with a strong maternal instinct, had warmed into mutual understanding He comforted her over her disappointment at Jacques Raverat's marriage to Gwen Darwin, and she counselled him on his difficult situation with Noel Gradually he came to depend more on her, and after she visited him the following July at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester he wrote almost longingly " Ka, they've been talking, about You and Me Talking'" Unwilling to admit it, he was falling in love About the same time he began to hear other rumors that Ka was being seen around with a young painter he had met at Lady Ottoline's by the name of Henry Lamb...

...In the Spring of 1908 Brooke joined the Cambridge Fabian Society Here he met Kathenne"ka' Cox, the treasurer of the Society and Margery Olivier, the eldest daughter of Sir Sydney, then the governor of Jamaica At a parts in honor of the governor, Brooke found himself alone with Sir Sidney's youngest daughter Noel, a dark-haired, elusive girl several years his junior after a prolonged correspondence and caretully arranged meetings, they were secretly engaged in the summer of 1910...

...I shall go mad if you don't come," he had pleaded...

...Flower of England The Strange Destiny of Rupert Brooke By John Lehman Holt, Rinehart & Winston 178 pp $12 95 Reviewed by John A. Glusman Following Rupert Brooke's death in 1915, a commemoration in the Times of London, written in the high-flown phrases of funeral rhetoric, praised the young poet who had died of acute blood poisoning on the Dardanelles expedition in World War I "A voice had become audible," it read, "a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth engaged in this present war, than any other The voice has been swiftly stilled Only the echoes and memory remain, but they will linger " The eulogy carried the initials of the First Lord of the Admiralty, who at the time was none other than Winston Churchill...

...Thus Brooke's short life has become his most unforgettable work It is the element of the unknown that stimulates thoughts of him We turn from Brooke "not with a sense of completeness and finality," Lehmann concludes, aptly borrowing the words of Virginia Woolf, "but rather to wonder and question still what would he have been, what would he have done...

...O God, it is all too much of a piece It is like madness " Edward Marsh, the inspiration behind Georgian Poetry 1911-1912 and Brooke's literary executor, concluded his memoir with the words of Denis Browne in a letter of consolation to Brooke's mother "The loss is not only yours and ours, but the world's " Rupert Brooke had died, and taken with him the hearts and minds of an entire generation...

...Rupert took up the "poetic" life, with its rounds of breakfast teas and intellectual soirees, amorous intrigues and dinner parties But the poetry of the period, despite its innovative intentions, was sentimental in outlook and largely dated in style, a curious blend of post-Symbolist, pre-Modernist verse that came to be known as "Georgian " Beneath the facade of "new strength and beauty" were frustrated impulses and repressed feelings, ambivalent emotions and ambiguous motives, frequently founded on nothing more concrete than suspicion or less deadly than jealousy and guilt "The Victorian," Brooke wrote, "lies very close below the surface in every man "In the age of King George, however, the foundations of Victorian society were about to collapse...

...After Lulworth, Hassall felt, and Lehmann concurs, "Rupert never recovered his objectivity and sense of proportion " Geoffrey Keynes wrote to his friends that sometimes Rupert seemed "almost out of his mind ". Yet in spite of his subsequent cyclical bouts with depression, Brooke's writings—well-analyzed but poorly integrated into Lehmann's narrative-took on a new awareness of reality The shadowy influence of French symbolism and the English "decadent" poets gave way to form images...

...In Munich, a rapprochement was made and their affair was consummated-only to be broken and rekindled once more by Ka, then finally concluded over a year later in a letter from Brooke Friendship and camaraderie came to replace love, for as Brooke observed with cool detachment in "The Funeral of Youth," "Love had died long ago " Still, until his death Ka remained foremost in his heart, at the end, he thought of her as his widow...