Rupert Chawner Brooke was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially The Soldier. He was also known for his boyish good looks, which were said to have prompted the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to describe him as “the handsomest young man in England”.
Brooke sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915 but developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. He died on 23 April 1915, on the French hospital ship Duguay-Trouin, moored in a bay off the Greek island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea, while on his way to the landing at Gallipoli. As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, Brooke was buried at 11 pm in an olive grove on Skyros. (via Wikipedia)
On Love:
Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile;
Each kiss lasts but the kissing; and grief goes over;
Love has no habitation but the heart.
Love is a breach in the walls, a broken gate,
Where that comes in that shall not go again;
Love sells the proud heart’s citadel to Fate.
(From: Love)
Love is a flame;-we have beaconed the world’s night.
Infinite hungers leap no more; In the chance swaying of your dress; And love has changed to kindliness.
A kiss makes the heart young again and wipes out all the years.
On Life:
And Life has fired, and Death not shaded,
All Time’s uncounted bliss,
And the height o’ the world has flamed and faded,
Love, that our love be this!
(From: Mummia)
On Death:
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.
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there,
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.
On God:
It is shameful night, and God is asleep!
(From: The Song Of The Beasts)
Oh God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Other Quotes:
Stands the clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
That night, how could I sleep?
I lay and watched the lonely gloom;
And watched the moonlight creep
From wall to basin, round the room.
All night I could not sleep.
My night shall be remembered for a star
That outshone all the suns of all men’s days.