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“Among all who have been poets and died young, it is hard to think of one who, both in life and death, has so typified the ideal radiance of youth and poetry.”

In the grave among the olive trees on the island of Skyros, Brooke found at least one Certainty–that of being “among the English poets.” He would probably be the last to ask a more high-sounding epitaph.

His “Collected Poems” as published consist of eighty-two pieces, fifty of which were published in his first book, issued (in England only) in 1911. That is to say fifty of the poems were written before the age of 24, and seventeen of the fifty before 21. These last are thoroughly youthful in formula. We all go through the old familiar cycle, and Brooke did not take his youth at second hand. Socialism, vegetarianism, bathing by moonlight in the Cam, sleeping out of doors, walking barefoot on the crisp English turf, channel crossings and what not–it is all a part of the grand game. We can only ask that the man really see what he says he sees, and report it with what grace he can muster.

And so of the seventeen earliest poems there need not be fulsome praise. Few of us are immortal poets by twenty-one. But even Brooke’s undergraduate verses refused to fall entirely into the usual grooves of sophomore song. So unerring a critic as Professor Woodberry (his introduction to the “Collected Poems” is so good that lesser hands may well pause) finds in them “more of the intoxication of the god” than in the later rounder work. They include the dreaming tenderness of Day That I Have Loved; they include such neat little pictures of the gross and sordid as the two poems Wagner and Dawn, written on a trip in Germany. (It is curious that the only note of exasperation in Brooke’s poems occurs when he writes from Germany. One finds it again, wittily put, in Grantchester.)

This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here and there in Brooke’s work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible. Like all young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy basis of our humanity and found in it food for purging laughter. There was never a young poet worth bread and salt who did not scrawl ribald verses in his day; we may surmise that Brooke’s peers at King’s would recall many vigorous stanzas that are not included in the volume at hand. The few touches that we have in this vein show a masculine fear on Brooke’s part of being merely pretty in his verse. In his young thirst for reality he did not boggle at coarse figures or loathsome metaphors. Just as his poems of 1905-08 are of the cliche period where all lips are “scarlet,” and lamps are “relumed,” so the section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in the Shropshire Lad stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex images, and yet developing into the dramatic felicity of his sonnet The Hill:

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass,
You said, “Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old….” “And when we die
All’s over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips,” said I,
–“Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!”

“We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!” we said:
“We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!” … Proud we were
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
–And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.

The true lover of poetry, it seems to me, cannot but wish that the “1914” sonnets and the most perfect of the later poems had been separately issued. The best of Brooke forms a thin sheaf of consummate beauty, and I imagine that the little edition of “1914 and Other Poems,” containing the thirty-two later poems, which was published in England and issued in Garden City by Doubleday, Page & Company in July, 1915, to save the American copy right, will always be more precious than the complete edition. As there were only twenty-five copies of this first American edition, it is extremely rare and will undoubtedly be sought after by collectors. But for one who is interested to trace the growth of Brooke’s power, the steadying of his poetic orbit and the mounting flame of his joy in life, the poems of 1908-11 are an instructive study. From the perfected brutality of Jealousy or Menelaus and Helen or A Channel Passage (these bite like Meredith) we see him passing to sonnets that taste of Shakespeare and foretell his utter mastery of the form. What could better the wit and beauty of this song: